PHOENIX -

It’s interesting watching the auction industry heading towards more mobile, more technology and less personal contact. It’s also fun watching the continued vertical and horizontal integrations driven by the largest players in the market.

What is not so interesting is the fact that everything we seem to be moving towards, including the automated “if bid” process, takes a little bit more out of the personal touch factor and requires less and less experience in our industry to complete transactions.

Sounds a bit different from the direction I usually take in driving automation and mobility, but after 30 years in the industry, I truly value the personal relationships I have made with my consigning and buying partners.

Every time we sublet a help line to a third party, automate “if bids,” send e-blasts, communicate with email and create more and more buyer-centric arbitration rules to eliminate our natural role in the disclosure and arbitration process, I wonder what we have done to the industry and to the market.

Maybe that’s the reason behind the drop in our selling fees in reality and in inflationary terms, devalue the industry by trying to move share by price rather than service, and then reduce the level of personal service to make up for revenue declines or continue to push everything to the buyer side.

The retail automotive industry has rebounded because it learned from its past failures, and who would have thought we would ever have $70,000 trucks. And it still has a penchant for repeating some tendencies in a cyclical manner.

The auction industry, however, hasn’t yet learned that more disclosure (not less), more personalized service (not less) can and should go hand-in-hand with mobile technology, along with the increased costs that all of those things require. And like retail buyers, our consigning partners would address them if we led with service and not with price.

I look forward to the conversations and the debates at CARS/NAAA in March, a venue like NRC that puts all the best issues on the table and helps make the industry stronger each year.

Editor’s Note: Jim DesRochers is vice president at Dealers Auto Auction of the Southwest. As with any contributed content, the opinions expressed in this and other editorial columns are solely that of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Auto Remarketing or its parent company.