Happy New Year! I hope you enjoyed a relaxing time with family and friends over Christmas and had a few days to recharge your batteries. Service directors will need to be at the top of their game in 2018 because dealers will be depending on fixed ops

The annual massive SEMA-AAPEX gathering (say 140,000 peeps) in Las Vegas features literally hundreds of educational opportunities in almost any area of the automotive business and technical world.  This year I was particularly interested in social m

While the struggle to decrease unrepaired recall vehicles on the road continues, new business models and technologies are arriving which could dramatically reduce the problem. Foremost among them are the advancements in autonomous cars, the introduct

Most people check their mobile phones within five minutes of waking up. According to a study by Deloitte, people in the United States across all age groups check their phones 46 times during the course of a day.  That number could be as high as 150

A trending technology is the use of bots in customer service. While bots can certainly help companies manage communications faster, sometimes they fail to provide the correct information and consumers just stop communicating with them, pick up the ph

It’s always frustrating to read articles about the challenges legislators, manufacturers and states have with low recall compliance rates. And, even worse than the challenges is the finger-pointing going on, the lack of cooperation and the unwillin

When it comes to increasing service revenue, there is no shortage of areas to consider – improving process efficiency, expanding facilities, hiring more technicians, just to name a few. With an ever-expanding list of action-items, many dealerships

As industry experts forecast slumping sales numbers, a recent article in Automotive News suggests that shops can pick up the slack by getting back to customer-pay work. I cringed when I first read that, fearing that dealers would take this advice and

Successful dealerships know that their service department is imperative for creating customer loyalty and bringing in repeat customers and buyers. It has been found that service departments have been the highest growing in inbound prospect calls and