Those of you who know me know it's unlikely that I'll be called an expert on the English language. That's OK. I'm reminded of Dizzy Dean who was verbally attacked by the nation's teachers for butchering the English language in his play-by-play broadcasts of baseball games. The teachers feared a whole generation of boys would grow up talking like Dizzy.

What was Dizzy's response to the teachers? “You learn 'em English and I'll learn 'em baseball.”

I'm not trying to learn anybody English. But, I want to look at the word “service” and what it means. We all learned in elementary school that a verb is a word that describes an action and a noun is a person, place or thing. By my own definition, reached without the aid of a dictionary, I think “service” is both a verb and a noun.

What made me start thinking about service is my observation that it's no longer all that important to individuals and corporations to provide good, basic service to customers. Hopefully, those in the automotive service industry, in particular those of us in ASA, still place a premium on providing quality service to our customers.

Keeping in mind the definition of a verb, I hope our actions of “servicing” automobiles is truly of the highest quality. As a noun, I hope we are providing individuals a superior level of this thing called “customer service.”

If we are meeting these high standards of service, think how we'll stand out from all the other industries that seem to be losing sight of this important aspect of doing business.

Overall, I'm not optimistic that the quality of customer service will improve in our society. I am optimistic, however, that it will continue at a very high level in automotive service and, especially, among ASA shops.

PBS Film Released
Late last year, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) released a mini-documentary underwritten by ASA. This five-minute program is playing on PBS television stations nationwide.

PBS is dedicated to educational programming and does not allow commercial broadcasts. For that reason, our minidocumentary is educational. It is not a commercial for ASA. If it were a commercial, it would not receive a single airing. As an educational program, we know that we'll have more than 500 airings just in the first three months of this year.

Over the course of two years, we know the program will air thousands of times. This means millions of people will be exposed to the ASA logo and name, and your ASA shop will be identified as one providing quality service - both the verb and noun definitions. After all, the “S” in ASA stands for “Service.”

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