One of the most valuable assets a dealership can have is not its inventory or even its service department. It’s trust. Lose it once, and you could lose that customer for life. Most of the time, they simply stop coming back, and you will never know why.
While most customer satisfaction tools can tell you whether your customers are satisfied with their experience, they do not tell you whether they actually trust you to deliver that experience every time.
Joining us on today’s episode of CBT Now is customer experience expert Shep Hyken, who says dealers are not just losing business due to poor customer service but because of broken trust. If it can be measured, it can be managed, and Hyken has a way to measure trust: The Customer Confidence Score.
What is the Customer Confidence Score?
The Customer Confidence Score is a survey-based tool that asks customers one simple question: “On a scale of 1 to 10, do you trust us to do what’s right for you?”
"Without trust, nobody has confidence. So that's what we want to do is we want to make sure our customers trust us. It's that simple."
Hyken says dealers should shoot for a 9 or 10, noting that some customers who fully trust you just never give out perfect scores. Anything less, and you need to figure out what is going wrong.
Confidence is a result of trust, Hyken notes, not the other way around. If your customers trust your dealership, they will have confidence in your products, pricing, and processes.
The best way to build trust: be consistent
The best way to build trust, Hyken says, is by consistently delivering a great experience. His research found that 86% of customers who had a great experience say it makes them trust a company more.
“That basically is saying, treat me right. Do what you say you’re going to do, and I trust you. Because without trust, customers are going to look somewhere else,” Hyken says.
Trust is not about truth over lies. It is about consistency. For dealers, that means every visit, whether it is a sales inquiry, a service appointment, or a warranty issue, needs to deliver a predictable and reliable experience. A customer who does not know what they will get at your store will eventually find one where they do.
The power of the follow-up
Hyken developed the Customer Confidence Score after a food manufacturing client saw its satisfaction scores decline despite being friendly, responsive, and easy to work with. What he found was that incomplete orders were being sent out without proper communication to downstream customers. The problem was not customer service. It was a breakdown in communication and follow-through.
“The problem is they don’t trust you anymore because you don’t communicate properly when orders aren’t being fulfilled,” he says.
The same dynamic plays out on dealership service drives every day. A repair takes longer than promised, and no one calls. A part is on backorder, and the customer learns about it when they come to pick up their vehicle. Each of those moments is a quiet erosion of trust.
Once a low score surfaces, Hyken says dealers need to start asking follow-up questions. Such as, “Why did you give me that score? If you gave me a 5, what did we do that didn’t earn us a 10?”
That follow-up gives insight into the specific breakdown and opens the door to recover the relationship before that customer decides not to return.
How to handle bad reviews
Knowing there is a problem is not enough. Hyken encourages dealers to act on it quickly and directly.
That means following up personally with customers who had a poor experience or posted negative comments online. A direct, timely response can shift the entire trajectory of a customer relationship. Hyken outlines a five-step process for handling those moments:
- Acknowledge the problem
- Apologize
- Explain the fix
- Own it
- Act with urgency
Responding quickly is especially critical in the social media era. Dealers who engage consistently with negative reviews signal to every prospective buyer reading those exchanges that the store takes complaints seriously and handles them. That kind of visible accountability builds confidence even among customers who have never set foot on the lot.
The perception problem
Many dealers and general managers hold a distorted view of how well their stores are actually performing, Hyken says.
“80% of leaders think the service and experience is better than it is, because only 20% of customers feel the same way. That’s a big gap,” he says.
When leadership operates on an inflated sense of performance, recurring problems go unaddressed, and customers absorb the consequences. A complaint that surfaces repeatedly is not a coincidence. It is a systemic failure that needs to be fixed at the process level, not managed one unhappy customer at a time.
Every employee can have an off day, but if the same problem keeps surfacing regardless of who is working, the dealership needs to look harder at its systems, not just its staff.
In an era where car buyers have more options and louder voices than ever, Hyken says the dealerships that survive and grow will not necessarily be the ones that never make mistakes. They will be the ones who have built enough trust to weather those mistakes, respond with accountability, and give customers a reason to come back anyway.
