Lower deposits and more affordable repayment rates are helping Seat dealers confront the crisis of confidence responsible for holding back car sales.

The moves have increased showroom traffic and prompted Volkswagen’s Spanish brand to put a fresh focus on customer satisfaction, claims director Peter Wyhinny.

“We’ve gone back to basics and started to mine every opportunity we have. Each lead we get is now treated very seriously and follow-up calls leave every potential customer in no doubt that we both want and value his business,” he said.
Wyhinny told AM that Seat is now closely monitoring the way enquiries are handled by dealer staff.

“We are putting in our own leads to help us measure how they respond and the findings are being used to improve the quality of the network. This is really crucial these days, when every sale matters. We are using the monitoring in a coaching sense rather than a penalising sense,” he said.

Wyhinny said the new focus on response systems would be an ongoing process. “It’s about applying consistency to what we should be doing day in, day out. Sadly, this has not always happened in the past and we simply cannot have the situation where customers go away from a dealership with the feeling that no-one is bothered about them.

“We’re working to make sure the processes at each of our 112 outlets are sufficiently robust and I’m happy the lead monitoring system has resulted in improved success rates over the last six months.

“Our new Ibiza has had a tremendous reception and is the reason why our retail market share remains strong at 1.8% and up 0.2% year on year. But what we’re doing with the network is important because despite everything, the desire to buy cars is still alive,” he said.