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Companies from far and wide are lining up at Sewell Village Cadillac to learn a thing or two about bringing customers back for more

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OF ALL THE SIGNS A VISITOR MIGHT see hanging around Sewell Village Cadillac, Dallas's high-volume (and even higher profile) luxury-car dealership, two seem truly iconographic. They aren't easy to spot, given all the visual competition: banners urging technicians to strive for 100% FIXED -- 100% RIGHT; colored charts measuring their individual job-performance records; plaques citing Sewell Village as one of Cadillac's all-time leaders in customer satisfaction. But the signs are there. Both hang in the entrance to the service department. One reads, "We reserve the right to give preferential treatment to those who purchase their automobile from Sewell Village Cadillac." And, this being Texas, the other: "Please do not leave whiskey, guns, money, or other valuables in your car."

There is something profoundly generic about each of these statements. To begin with, giving preferential treatment to newcar customers is hardly a radical precept for running an auto dealership. Most dealers like to work on the cars they sell -- beyond the profits on a lube job, it promotes customer contact and repeat business.

At Sewell Village, however, the concept has been refined to what might appropriately be called Neiman-Marcus status. Upon purchasing a car from Sewell Village, each customer is assigned a personal service adviser whose sole job is to take the hassle out of maintaining and repairing his customers' automobiles. Among other duties, advisers write up all service orders, answer questions and complaints, and, when required, provide 24-hour emergency road service for clients stranded in the breakdown lane. The relationship between a Sewell Village Cadillac owner and service adviser extends over the life of the car and more closely resembles the bond between patient and therapist than it does your basic car owner/mechanic arrangement.

And oh, those little touches. Need an oil change? Not only will a dealer representative fetch your car for servicing, but with a 150-car loaner fleet at its disposal, Sewell can also guarantee that you won't have to go auto-less for more than 15 minutes, max. Transmission trouble on a Saturday night? You might, as some customers have, call up Carl Sewell himself (he's listed in the phone book), who has been known to dash over and swap your car for his, lest you fail to make that important dinner date on time.

Shopping the showroom? There, beneath three 10-foot brass chandeliers set off by a huge cut-glass vase of fresh gladioli, you'll find posh upholstery and fine Chinese porcelain. In the conference room with its silk-upholstered walls, you'll watch a slick, state-of-the-art slide show. Why shouldn't you feel as good about buying a car from Carl Sewell as you would about buying a fur from Stanley Marcus?

These amenities do not come cheap. The annual cost for operating a single courtesy vehicle, for example, totals $5,000, or $750,000 for the entire fleet. Nor does one run an operation like this with a staff of minimum-wage clock punchers. In Carl Sewell's village, the hours run long, the standards high.

Potential employees undergo a battery of psychological tests designed, says Sewell, to measure "intensity, aggressiveness, intelligence -- and stamina." For the few chosen to join his 250-employee family, the rewards can be significant. For example, technicians easily knock down $50,000 to $60,000 a year, a few as much as $90,000. Service advisers pull in six figures. And they do this on repair and body-shop bills that are competitive with other dealers.

Far from making the service department a loss leader, however, Sewell's system actually promotes profitability. Like most employees at Sewell Village, service technicians and advisers are compensated based on their productivity and managers on the bottom-line performance of their departments. Salespeople are on commission, and only the accounting staff is on salary. And the bottom-line performance is very good, says Sewell, who doesn't divulge specific numbers, though he does report sales of $100 million. Productivity is exceptionally high, and departmental costs are spread over unusually large volume. Sewell Village has Cadillac's largest service department in the country. And the service side helps feed sales: the dealership ranks fourth in retail sales of new Cadillacs as well, due probably in part to its number-two ranking in customer-satisfaction surveys among all Cadillac dealers.

"However you measure it, personal effort or money," avers Stanley Marcus, chairman emeritus of the famous Dallas-based department store and a man who knows Sewell Village intimately as both customer and consultant, "Carl has paid the price you have to pay to give high-quality service to the customer. And he profits by it. He sells cars, but like so many other great retailers, selling [the product] is not really his business. His business is customer satisfaction."

However you measure it, indeed. Carl Sewell, who is 44, has dozens of little internal measurements by which he calibrates his business. Gaze past all the "quality job" charts on the wall (a monthly graph for every technician, right down to the people who polish the cars) and see how efficient his workplace is. A computer system tracks 555 parking spaces, so technicians don't waste time hunting cars down. An intercom system lets them have parts pulled for one order while they're filling another, so they don't waste time at the parts desk. All the paper they need to process a job is in one place, easily at hand. Technicians, as a rule, don't waste time at Sewell Village. As they say there, technicians don't make money when they're not turning a wrench, and the dealership doesn't make money when the technicians aren't making money. At $42 an hour, psychiatry should work so well.

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