Three-store, Case IH dealer Ritchie Implement of Cobb, Wis., takes pride in providing a high level of service for their customers. Kevin Depies, sales and management, says the dealership tries to treat its customers like partners.

“We try to stay in communication with our customers and keep them up to date on their machines and different products and services they might want to look in to,” he says.

To keep customers up to date, Ritchie’s regularly puts on customer-training courses on how to use the equipment, as well as best practices on how to get the best return on investment from their purchases. “We bring them to the dealership and run them through the technical side of things; things that you can’t show them in the field,” Depies says.

“We’ve been proactive in trying to minimize the pressure on the service department for questions like, how do I open this menu? We are able to cover a lot of those technical questions preseason.”

This saves both the dealer and customer time and money and also works to strengthen the dealership’s relationship with its customers. In the first quarter of 2015, Ritchie’s had already held 7 customer-training events for multiple types of machines and plans to continue doing more throughout the year.