1. The Web site is freakin’ awesome. What other company gives you the ability to search for a car by so many different criteria?

2. The Sales Consultants are non-commissioned. You know what that means? They’re out to help you, not themselves. Granted, I only have experience with one sales consultant, Patrick Porter in Tucson, AZ, but I have to say that he gave my husband and me hands-down the best customer service experience we’ve ever had.

3. The Price Sticker – what you see is what you get. Part of this goes back to the non-commissioned sales consultants; there’s no need to haggle on the pricing of the car.

4. The Sales Process was long, but like I said earlier, it was the best experience I’ve ever had. We didn’t get tossed around from department to department – financing, sales, etc. – Patrick was our CarMax host all the way through the process.

5. The Choice of Cars is vast. There isn’t just a large selection of high-quality used cars at each location, but they’ll ship what you want where you want. You can search for the car you want online, and they’ll ship it to your local CarMax. Yes, there’s a fee, but when you can get exactly what you want, I don’t think it’s such a big deal to pay a little extra.

The husband with our "new" car!

6. CarMax does Twitter right. CarMax knows what they’re doing when it comes to social media and customer service. Any business that doesn’t see the connection between the two nowadays is missing a huge opportunity. Just to give one example:

The night we bought our new (”previously owned”) car, my husband and I both tweeted pictures of us with our new purchase. We were thrilled about it. And you know what, CarMax was excited for us too, because they responded to our tweets.

From the moment I picked up the phone to call CarMax to the time we drove off the lot, I’ve gotten ridiculously great customer service from CarMax. Actually, the service still continues today. Even if they’re not actively doing anything now to “serve” me, I can tell that CarMax cares. I’m a happy customer. I tell ALL my friends EVERYONE where to get their next car. I’m a fan for life because CarMax is made of awesome.