Transforming Auto Sales & Service Through Customer Experience

Family-owned dealership group redefines its future by making customer experience a priority

Transforming the dealership experience with CX strategy aligns operations, builds trust, and drives 30–40% higher service revenue—without adding headcount.

Challenge:

Over the past 50 years, this family-owned dealership group has expanded to over 30 locations across several states, earning deep community trust and building a strong operational base. But the auto industry is now facing major disruption.

New vehicle margins are shrinking. Local competition— both within and across brands—is intensifying. Costs are climbing. And digital disruption is everywhere: from sellers like Carvana and Amazon to research tools like Kelley Blue Book and Cars.com, to the growing influence of social media reviews. In this landscape, customer experience (CX) has become the most important competitive edge.

Leadership increasingly sees new car sales not as the end goal, but as the beginning of a high-value, long term customer relationship. That relationship goes well beyond scheduled service or the eventual trade-in and repurchase cycle.

Customer friction points, generational trust gaps, and internal communications issues held back growth and exposed the need for a greater focus on experience and operational alignment.

Yet the fight for that ongoing loyalty is escalating. Independent shops, national chains, and digital-first upstarts are all competing for the same repeat service and sales business. Customers now expect seamless, hybrid digital-physical experiences—and won’t hesitate to post their opinions when brands fall short.

Approach:

McorpCX was engaged to design a long-term CX strategy grounded in real customer and employee insights, focused on building a sustainable competitive advantage through experience and brand with predictable and measurable impact on operating results, customer feedback and culture.

To achieve this, McorpCX:

• Performed an assessment of the company capability and culture, informing the teams’ ability to realistically 
  achieve transformation and the priority of the recommendations;
• Defined a clear, company-wide brand experience vision, that is well understood and embraced across 
  all levels of the organization;
• Built custom CX metrics, to reflect customer perceptions beyond traditional CSI and social media 
  scores;
• Mapped the full sales and service journey, via first person customer research and internal sessions to identify experience gaps and pain points;
• Facilitated workshops and interviews, to uncover team challenges and co-create solutions;
• Introduced “Erica”, an AI-generated persona representing a skeptical younger customer— to personalize findings and drive empathy across leadership and teams.

Findings:

Despite strong overall performance in recent years and continued growth, several issues limited the company’s achievement of internal goals and customer expectations. Seemingly small friction points—such as unclear communication, missed appointments, and lack of amenities—collectively eroded brand trust. This multiplied inherent concerns many customers have when entering any auto sales and service experience.

Generational trust differences were stark: older customers exhibited strong loyalty, while younger, especially female, customers approached the dealership experience with hesitation. Employees, despite having ample feedback data, often lacked awareness of customer perspectives. Operational misalignment— uneven training, unclear accountability, and resource constraints—further compounded the challenge.

CX Transformation in Action

To address these challenges, the company launched a comprehensive transformation. Experience values were cascaded from leadership to the frontline, ensuring everyone understood and embraced the new customer promise.

Role-based dashboards and custom CX metrics which aligned clearly with business results were introduced to track delivery of these values across digital and physical touchpoints. 

The sales and service journey were redesigned to ensure seamless, transparent, multichannel interactions. Training and communications reinforced expectations and best practices, while stronger governance and performance accountability ensured alignment at every level.

Results and Outlook

While the journey continues, early results show strong cultural momentum and operational alignment.  The company expects a 30–40% lift in high-margin service revenue, improved profit margins, and better employee engagement and retention. 

Faster acquisition integration, an over 2x rise in referrals, up-sell growth, and greater team loyalty are also projected. 
These gains support resilience and position the company as a CX leader with preferred manufacturer support.

Conclusion

This dealership group is redefining success by putting customer experience at the center of its business model and the essential brand differentiator. Their investment in CX is not only building customer trust—it’s creating a durable business advantage for the next 50 years, with aspirations to set the gold standard for auto sales and service nationwide and across industries.