Todd tells this story about his experience with a dealership for one of the world's largest automotive companies.

Three years ago, I bought a new car, and after the car was purchased the dealership worked hard to keep me coming back for warranty service and maintenance. The service team was professional, friendly, and helpful. Right around the three-year anniversary of the purchase, I started getting calls from the dealer asking if I wanted to sell my car, since supposedly “there was high demand for my make and model” on the used car market.

I'm a buy-and-hold kind of guy when it comes to cars; I drove my last car 250,000 miles. I buy them, I service them correctly, and I keep them as long as they run reliably. This car was only three years old, and I figured I would own it for another 10 years. However, the dealership called me at least once a month for four months trying to get me to sell that car. It wasn't one inquiry, it was multiple calls every month, and those calls kept coming

Each time they called, I politely told them, “Please make a note in your CRM. You have a CRM, right?” They said, “Yes.” I tried to be as explicit as possible. “Please make a note in your CRM that I am not going to sell this car anytime soon. Please do not call me again and ask me if I want to trade it in.”

On the fifth such call, I was a little less patient. “This is getting ridiculous,” I said. “If you call me again, I promise you, I will never step foot within your dealership again. Ever. For anything. For the rest of my life.”

Guess what happened the next month? The dealership called me again. I said, “That's it. I warned you. You didn't listen. You neglected to put the notes in my contact record to not call me, so I am never coming back to your dealership. I will never buy anything from you again.”

I said, “I hope you're recording this call and your management hears it.” Sure enough, they were recording the call. The boss called me an hour later. She was apologetic in every way, up and down, trying to explain the circumstances.

Her proposed solution to make me happy again was to remove my name from the database so that none of the dealership employees could even attempt to call me. Even that solution did not work. They called me again with the same pitch less than three months later.

The manager was very pleasant and considerate. She said she was going to send me a little something to make it up to me, a certificate for some free service. But I told her it wasn't good enough. I had already warned the dealership contacts who called me the previous four times. Now, six times in total. The time for a discount to make me happy had long passed. The customer service follow-up staff had betrayed the trust built over the previous three years since the initial sale. I was happy with them. I had no outstanding issues. I loved driving that vehicle. The dealership performed great service when I brought the car for warranty service on the recommended schedule. But their service marketing follow-up ruined it all. The positive experience of a multiyear relationship went out the window, and now I had moved on. Another dealer services the vehicle.

The dealer's service follow-up was completely out of sync with my persona, my buyer journey, and me.

The lesson for businesses today is that mistakes like this ruin the entire buyer experience and can end the relationship. The buyer is in control, has options, and no longer has to tolerate a bad experience.

Let's review this example through the lens of an ideal inbound strategy.

Was this part of the customer experience personalized to the buyer?

No. Our family owns another vehicle from another car company, and they run the same service promotion, so it was disingenuous. The other dealership had a better CRM and stopped calling after I explained our buy-and-hold philosophy. At the first dealership, I wasn't treated with honesty or respect. I was treated like a box to check or a rule to follow. They didn't even listen to me.

Was the dealership engaging?

No. They talked and never listened. When I picked up the phone, the rep went straight to the pitch and didn't ask me any questions about what I wanted and how I wanted to be treated. They had no interest in helping me with my particular situation. Even when I stated my preference, they didn't take the extra step to try to help; they ignored my request.

Was this interaction layered to match where I was on the buyer journey?

Not at all. The rep wanted to push me into his “three years since the sale” bucket and get another call in. He had no way to differentiate me from the other three-year buyers or acknowledge my preferences. The service department couldn't differentiate between different types of customers and was under the mistaken impression that everyone who buys a car would want to upgrade three years later. They arrogantly believed they could push everyone into one bucket and provide the same experience to everyone, regardless of my stated preference.

Was the service interaction human?

Nope. The dealership had no interest in developing an understanding of me as a person or treating me like a human being. Would they ask me the same question five times if I were standing in front of them? There was no interest in establishing a personal relationship with me or acknowledging and accepting my car buying habits. At best, I was a transaction even when I stated my personal preference. I told them many times I was the buy-and-hold persona. How hard would it have been to have a script or playbook that pivoted into another offer for special service for buy-and-hold people? How hard would it have been to provide me educational content that explained how to maintain my vehicle to reach maximum miles driven? Maybe even a concierge service for people who make a long-term commitment to servicing the vehicle exclusively at that dealer for the life of the car. The fact that I was three years postpurchase mattered much more to them than treating me like a human being.

Are my expectations are too high for a car dealership? No way. I spent a lot of money with them and committed to their product for the long term. Shouldn't I expect a reciprocal arrangement if I drop $45,000?

What produced this experience?

The service reps probably had a quota of calls to make, maybe 120 a day. They were using an auto dialer and started off each call by annoying me since no one likes that pause, click, noise in the background, and then someone finally picks up. They were burdened with lousy information systems that provided no way to systematically notate my preferences once they found out I was the buy-and-hold persona. The last rep who called me had no context from the previous calls or feedback I shared, so he was at a decided disadvantage. He was not empowered to engage with me beyond the narrow offer of getting me to trade in my car for a new one.

The manager who called probably used a natural language processing tool to understand that they had an issue with a customer, and she jumped in to take over for the service rep and try to stop the bleeding the best she could. Her proposed solution to make me happy by taking me out of the database indicates that there was no internal mechanism to improve the experience for customers.

Neither the manager nor the service rep were empowered to engage me or make a real decision, resulting in a negative experience that led to a death spiral for our relationship.

It is easy to imagine a sterile, corporate environment with rows and rows of desks with unhappy people wearing headsets making their calls with the sole intent of hitting their dialing numbers. The dealership team lacked the culture, the systems, the processes, and the leadership needed to deliver a positive customer experience that I as a buyer desire and expect.

The problem is not with the employees in the trenches who make the calls, but with the leaders of companies that still think this type of service process is a valuable activity. When you treat all your customers the same and ignore the reality of today's buyer, you potentially reverse all of the goodwill the marketing, sales, and service teams and the rest of the company created.

This is not an inbound organization.