Last weekend I took my iPhone 15 to the Apple Store at the Spectrum to deal with some water damage. I have a theory about what caused it involving a battery replacement that wasn't sealed properly, but Apple had a different theory and gave me a new phone under warranty, which is remarkable in its own right.
What was more remarkable was Syna.
She handled the whole visit with the kind of attention that you notice because you've stopped expecting it. She was present. She was genuinely engaged with solving the actual problem. When it was over, I told her how much I appreciated it, and we ended up talking about how hard it is to find. She told me Apple Stores have trouble finding it too.
That's the tell. Apple has built one of the most deliberately constructed customer service cultures in retail. The Genius branding. The training programs. The physical store design that stages the experience from the moment you walk in. If Apple can't manufacture the thing Syna has, it doesn't manufacture.
You Can't Train a Heart Posture
I was raised in Texas. Yes ma'am. No sir. When you went to someone's house for dinner, you ate the food and you said you liked it even if you didn't. My father's reasoning had nothing to do with manners as a performance. The family worked hard to buy that food and put it on the table, and I should cultivate gratitude for it. The manners were downstream of the posture.
That's what Syna had. It wasn't that she knew the right thing to say. It was that she was genuinely glad to help. Those are different things, and customers have always been able to tell them apart.
The Ritz-Carlton articulates it as plainly as anyone. You can teach someone the technical requirements of any position, but you cannot teach them to have a sincere, caring attitude toward others. So they hire for the attitude and train for everything else. Zappos does the same. Nordstrom's legendary employee handbook fits on a notecard and says, in essence, use your best judgment. The logic is consistent across all three. The character is not trainable, so identify for it first and build everything else on top.
The automotive industry inverted that equation.
What the Numbers Say
American dealerships have spent decades building systems to install customer care from the outside in. CRM platforms. Follow-up sequences. Net Promoter Score surveys. Service satisfaction tracking. JD Power publishes an annual study and the industry watches it the way a patient watches a blood pressure monitor.
The 2026 Customer Service Index overall score landed at 868 out of 1,000. Up 3 points from last year. Porsche leads at 915, which tells you something about what premium pricing buys you in terms of the experience surrounding the product.
Then there's the rest of what the data shows.
One in three people who call a dealership's service department never reaches a live person. Maintenance visits that take 90 minutes at an independent shop take nearly three hours at a franchise dealer. Only 54 percent of owners who bought their vehicle at a dealership returned to that same dealership for service, down from 72 percent two years ago. And 32 percent of digital leads never receive any response at all.
The industry built the systems and forgot to build the culture.
What Tesla Was Actually Solving For
When Tesla launched its direct sales model, the auto industry framed it as a distribution disruption. Cutting out the middleman. Protecting margins. Simplifying the supply chain.
That's not what customers were responding to.
Buyers are willing to pay more for a low-effort buying experience. That finding, which shows up consistently in automotive purchase research, is not a statement about price sensitivity. It's a statement about what the franchise dealership model costs people emotionally. The fixed pricing, the no-negotiation floor, the ability to configure and order online. Customers were willing to pay more for it. Not because the process was elegant, but because the alternative made them feel like prey.
CarMax built a $30 billion business on essentially the same insight. The product was ordinary. The experience was dignified. Customers went there because nobody was going to corner them in a finance office for forty-five minutes.
That's what happens when a company doesn't build a soul. Customers write the story of what it is. And they write it accurately.
The CEO Who Responds to Everything
This week I posted on LinkedIn about a founder I've interacted with probably six or seven times over the past year. Comments, replies, direct messages about things that have nothing to do with his company. He responds every time.
His name is Mark Tapscott. He's co-founder and CEO of Longbow Motors, building featherweight hand-built electric sports cars in Britain. They're making 150 of the first model.
The post reached 3,900 people in three hours, 96 percent of them outside my existing network. JLR showed up in the company engagement data. Aston Martin Performance Technologies. Stellantis. A Main Board Director and Investor viewed my profile twenty minutes after it went up.
Those organizations weren't engaging with a post about a startup. They were engaging with something they recognized. They know what it looks like when it's present and what it costs when it isn't.
Tapscott's responsiveness isn't a protocol. It's who he is. And the company that gets built by someone who operates that way tends to reflect it. In the product. In the customer relationship. In how a problem gets resolved five years after delivery.
What Leaders Can Actually Do
You cannot hold a training session on gratitude. You can require the words and not get the thing. Every dealership in America has a greeting protocol. Very few have a Syna.
What you can do is hire for the posture and protect it once it exists. Ask in the interview process not what someone would do in a service scenario but what they have done. Look for specificity. A candidate who tells you about a customer they remember by name is telling you something a candidate who summarizes their philosophy cannot.
Then please, for your own sake, get out of the way. Nordstrom's entire employee handbook fits on a notecard. The reason isn't minimalism. The company understood something most operators still haven't. Empowerment is the prerequisite for genuine service. You cannot express gratitude on a script. You can only express it when you're trusted to act on your own judgment.
And at the top, the standard is the simplest and the hardest. Respond. To the difficult email. To the DM that has nothing to do with business. To the customer whose complaint is inconvenient. The company takes its cue from the person running it. Always.
The Soul Argument
Every company generates a reputation. The question is whether leadership authors it or customers do.
When the culture is built intentionally, when the people running it are genuinely grateful for the people they serve and they hire and protect others who feel the same way, the reputation reflects it. It compounds slowly and it holds.
When it isn't built that way, customers write it. They write it in reviews. In referral conversations. In the decision to configure online instead of calling the dealer back. They write it from every unanswered call, every 47-minute lead response, every service advisor who looked past them when they walked through the door.
The automotive industry has not run short of data telling it what's wrong. It has run short of the willingness to address what's underneath the data.
Every company needs a soul. If you don't have one, your customer will give you one. And you may not want it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does JD Power's 2026 Customer Service Index actually measure?
The JD Power CSI measures the customer service experience at franchised dealerships during vehicle ownership, scored on a 1,000-point scale. The 2026 study found an overall score of 868 out of 1,000, up 3 points from 2025. Porsche led all brands at 915. The numbers that tell the fuller story sit outside the index itself: one in three callers never reaches a live person, 47-minute average lead response time, 32% of digital leads receiving no response, and service retention down from 72% to 54% in two years.
Why do dealerships keep losing service business despite investing in CRM systems?
Because CRM systems address the process, not the posture. A system can log a customer interaction, trigger a follow-up, and flag an unanswered lead. It cannot make the person who receives the call glad the customer called. The industry built sophisticated follow-up infrastructure around a service culture that was never there to begin with. Customers who don't feel valued at the dealership don't return to the dealership, regardless of how many touchpoints the system logs.
What did Tesla actually disrupt — distribution or customer experience?
The auto industry framed Tesla's direct sales model as a distribution disruption. That's accurate structurally but misses what customers were responding to. Research consistently shows buyers are willing to pay more for a low-effort buying experience. Fixed pricing, no negotiation, configure-and-order online — customers chose these not because the process was elegant but because the alternative made them feel like prey. Tesla solved for the posture problem. CarMax had already proven the same insight: a $30 billion business built on ordinary product and a dignified experience.
How does the Nordstrom one-notecard handbook apply to automotive dealerships?
Nordstrom's employee handbook fits on a notecard and says, in essence, use your best judgment. The logic is that genuine service cannot be expressed through a script — it requires the person delivering it to be trusted to act on their own judgment. Most dealership service environments operate on the opposite assumption: that scripts, processes, and approval chains reduce variance. They do reduce variance. They also guarantee that a customer who needs something genuinely resolved has to navigate a system that was designed to process them, not help them. Empowerment is the prerequisite for genuine service.
Can you hire for a service culture, or does it have to be built from the top?
Both, in sequence. You hire for the posture first — candidates who remember customers by name, who give specific examples rather than summarizing their approach, who were genuinely glad to help rather than performing the gladness. Then you protect what you hired by removing the systems that prevent them from acting on their own judgment. The top sets the template. A leader who treats responsiveness as optional is telling the organization the same thing. Culture descends from behavior at the top, not from values statements posted in break rooms.
What does a CEO's response rate on LinkedIn have to do with the quality of their product?
More than it looks like. A founder who responds to every comment, reply, and direct message — including ones unrelated to the company — is demonstrating a posture that organizations reflect in their products. The behavior is consistent with someone who is genuinely present, genuinely interested, and genuinely grateful for the attention. Companies built by people who operate that way tend to express it in the product itself: in build quality, in how a problem gets resolved five years after delivery, in what the customer relationship feels like over time. The responsiveness isn't a marketing tactic. It's character, and character shows up in what you ship.
