The Informers

Pursue customer-service excellence or total quality management all you want. Before they have a chance, your company has to master the most fundamental management secret of all. Just ask the folks at Childress Buick/Kia

The thing I hate about getting my car back from the repair shop isn't the bill. It's that it's no longer my car. The seat's back -- way back, thanks to some long-legged jerk of a mechanic. And there's a smudge on the door handle. But the thing I really hate -- OK, it's a small thing, but it's really irritating -- is that my favorite radio stations have disappeared.

But if I lived in Phoenix and took my car to Childress Buick/Kia Co., I'd still be tuned to my favorite country-music station when I drove off the lot. Before the car's battery was disconnected, a nine-volt battery -- the kind you can buy anywhere -- would have been plugged into the cigarette lighter to save the stations I'd programmed. Terrific idea, right? It didn't come from management. It was a suggestion from an employee, the kind of suggestion that really makes a difference to a customer and whose implementation probably makes the employee feel great, too.

The battery is only one of many top-notch suggestions that flow up from the workforce at Childress, and that's just the way president George Russel Childress wants it. "Information must bubble up from YOU to PREVENT ongoing frustrations," he writes in Dealer Direct, a newsletter for employees.

Ronald Reagan never met George Childress, but he'd surely relinquish his "Great Communicator" title if he did. To 34-year-old Childress -- "Rusty" to everyone but the taxman -- the only way to grow the business is to harness the collective brainpower of the people who work there. ("I go to a seminar, read a book, and now I'm the smart one? That doesn't make any sense.") And the only way to do that is to have information sloshing about, all the time, across departments, down from managers to employees, up from workers to managers. And it does. The battery trick? That's nothing. You should see the daily video in the customer lounge, another employee's idea. (Some customers call to find out what's showing on a given day so they can schedule a service appointment around it.) The popcorn popper next to the VCR? Also an employee's idea.

The suggestion flow is one of the myriad ways in which information moves around the company, and it's not just from the boss, either. Dance and sculpture have yet to be used, but just about every other communication medium is at work: electronic mail and bulletin boards; hot lines; newsletters and questionnaires and meeting notes; town-hall meetings; and teams and focus groups. Each tool is simple, low cost, and low tech (no videoconferencing budget here). Each by itself is unremarkable. But taken together, welded into a culture in which you keep hearing the same stories and the same words, the tools are powerful. And channeled through an employee-run team (in a company with only 122 employees!) set up last summer specifically to improve internal communication, their effect is dynamite.

Rest assured, the dealership has its fair share of communication snafus, just like the rest of us. Meetings start late and run long. There's confusion about a memo that bans eating at desks. ("Not even a candy bar?") And there's more befuddlement about who'll be affected, and how, when the service shop starts opening on Saturday mornings. Yet Childress seems more like a start-up whose five employees are reveling in the hot news of a second big order than a company that's just celebrated its 35th birthday with a huge showroom bash for hundreds of customers. By rights the dealership should have lost the joy of scuttlebutt, the compulsive information sharing so many small companies start out with and gradually lose as they grow.

The purpose of the communication game is evident to even the rawest recruit. In textbook fashion, Rusty Childress explains, "By maintaining open communication with customers and employees, not only will you learn exactly what customers need and expect, but employees' job satisfaction will increase as well, which will help perpetuate your department's high level of service quality." Childress's CSIs -- the customer-service indexes dealerships have been gauged by in the last few years -- are regularly above 95% for overall customer satisfaction, and everyone knows it: monthly breakdowns are posted on walls and in newsletters. And employee turnover, at around 20%, is low for the industry. Employees are unanimous in their claims that this place -- an auto dealership, for crying out loud -- is a great place to work. At other places, says Judy Kane, the weekend switchboard operator, it's "mind your own business and get on with your work. Here, you know who's who, where people are, who's in, when they come in." Without the free flow of information, believes service manager Tom Anderson, the dealership itself would be much smaller. It might even be no more.

It wasn't ever thus at Childress. The company may have billed itself "The Friendliest Place in Town" -- it still does -- but that didn't mean managers felt compelled to share information with workers, or vice versa, or that one department had much to do with another. It took a crisis to bring real change.

Childress Buick/Kia sits close to where I-17 curls out of central Phoenix, heading north toward the Grand Canyon. Across the road are a Discount Tire Co. and a Burger King. If you're no fan of the Whopper, you can cruise on down Camelback Road a few blocks to Ramiro's Taco Shop, though most of the dealership's customers -- many from retirement communities in nearby Sun City -- prefer the familiarity of Denny's pancakes close by. Down a few blocks, you could check out the Dollar Store ("Nothing More Than a Dollar"). Perhaps you'd see that black BMW parked in front of Teaser's Topless Dancing ("Contest Tonight!"). From the outside, you'd never give Childress a second glance: it looks like a zillion other auto dealerships, streamers aflutter and gleaming 1995 models out front.

Moving more than 65 new Buicks a month, Childress is one of the GM line's 50 largest shops, and a wallful of Best in Class awards testifies to Buick's satisfaction with the arrangement. With Childress's customer-retention rate (the percentage of new-car buyers who bring their cars to be serviced at the dealership) above 70% -- the industry average tops out at 30% -- it's little wonder many other car dealers, as well as hospitals and deluxe hotels, come here to visit, using Childress as a benchmark for customer service. In late 1993 Childress's record led Kia, a South Korean marque new to the United States, to give Childress a franchise. It's successful by any standard: after-tax profits topped $900,000 on 1994 revenues of more than $39 million, up on both counts from the year before and the year before that. (The body shop plays a starring role: its revenues are growing 12% a year.)