Our top tips for customer retention

Customer retention is the single most valuable thing for business growth, and in today’s competitive environment, valuing your existing buyer is more essential than ever for auto dealers. Our business development manager, Jon Sheard, shares his top tips for customer retention in the car dealership sector.

Once a shopper leaves a dealership in their new car, getting them to come back for regular service or car maintenance can be tricky. As a result, generating revenue from existing relationships is becoming more crucial – but, how can we make car owners commit to their next visit?

In recent years, franchise dealers are becoming hotter than ever when it comes to analysing their customer databases to ascertain which customers have equity in their vehicles by way of a deposit.

This allows sales teams to match customers with new car programmes to replace their existing vehicle without raising their monthly payments – a process often called ‘equity mining’. We’ve seen this used in practice by manufacturers with systems such as eMaster and Key2Key.

However, maintaining a post-purchase rapport that lasts through the entire customer lifecycle isn’t something that just happens. You must invest time and resources into maintaining existing connections, just the same as you do with new contacts.

This shift can’t be said for used car retention, mainly because dealers use multiple lenders to finance used cars, so data is kept in numerous locations, rather than in one place. However, there are now solutions available using DealTrak’s platform to pull together all the data required and merge this with existing stock data to match customers with buyer-specific criteria. This process generates used car department leads – in the same way as new car departments have been doing for years.

Dealtrak offer solutions for new and used car dealers across the UK so, get in touch to find out more!