What Car Salesmen Are Going to Disney to Learn, from Time Magazine.
How your Chevrolet dealer is taking lessons from Disney, Apple and McDonald’s
What do Disneyland and Chevrolet have in common? Car dealers.
Chevrolet—by far the largest-selling brand owned by General Motors—has been sending its auto dealers to Disney World for the past four years. As part of a program that began in January 2011, Chevy sales teams participate in workshops in Orlando and Anaheim with the Disney Institute, Disney’s customer-service consulting division.
The Disney Institute, which works with a wide range of companies from Häagen-Dazs to United Airlines, specializes in retraining company employees in customer service. There, Chevrolet dealers are taught to act like theater actors: When they meet customers at the dealership, they’re onstage playing the gracious host. Through this process, Chevy dealers learn the finer points of focusing on the customer, an art the Mouse House has perfected over the years.
