Lastly and most simply I urge you to reflect on how much of your marketing budget is actually allocated to aftersales.
Long gone are the days when your sales customers will loyally return to your workshops. In the age of the connected consumer, there are many players out there wise to the aftersales opportunity. Don’t let them steal your lunch. With a greater marketing budget allocation and a little attention, franchised dealers can seize back the initiative.
Hi Reg - it's not quite as simple as that. We (WhoCanFixMyCar.com) looked into this and our findings were published by AM-Online here: http://www.am-online.com/news/2014/10/7/exploding-the-myths-in-the-franchised-v-independent-servicing-battle/37024/. There is, of course, a price difference between main dealers and independents, but it's smaller than you might think according to our data. Just 6% in the case of routine servicing and MOTs. Cheers Alex
Hi Alex/Reg/Hugh, Firstly Hugh, franchised dealers pumping more spend into aftersales marketing (i.e. Google PPC) is going to be nice business for Google, but you are going to start a price war on aftersales related keywords, much as there has been between the used car portals for many years. The result, garages having to pay more to market their services, either directly with Google or via the new aftersales start-ups you mention, and this cost has to be recovered somewhere - and the consumer will end up paying. Alex, whilst your research was semi-interesting, when publishing figures you need to also explain the data it is based on. What is the sample size, how many of the jobs analysed were quotes vs. won (and carried out) work? You might have 50k users and 4k garages but how many of these had work carried out - very few I suspect. Reg, a lot is to do with the perception of pricing - whilst there isn't much difference between franchised and independents (although much higher than 6%) customers think there is. The other important aspect is quality of work. Independents have to do much more to prove they are good at what they do, with Franchises they have the brand awareness of the Manufacturers... What is more interesting is that a Google representative can get a feature article on AM - shouldn't it be called a Sponsored Ad? Regards.
As an industry Aftersales professional for a long time, let me tell you that I have had sizeable fleet customers walk away from me to independents, for a lower labour rate (and probably), some form of "sweetener". Only to return to us later after some analysis of their spend, versus us. Yes, their labour rate may be lower, but the hours invoiced are considerably higher.
Reg willcox - 03/11/2014 14:59
Never mind all this cock and bull, its down to pricing. Dealers cant or wont match the independents simple as that