Customer retention gets talked about in the motor trade with a comforting simplicity: if you can keep more of the customers you already have, you protect profit, smooth volatility and build a base that will buy again, writes Aimée Turner.
The complication is that “retention” is rarely one thing. It is not just a workshop metric, not just a renewal campaign and not just a score on an OEM dashboard.
It is a chain of experiences, handovers and expectations, tested repeatedly by new entrants, alternative service providers and customers whose definition of convenience is constantly resetting.
AM spoke to Chris Wiseman, founder of Wiseman Automotive Insights and former managing director at dealer group Wessex Garages; Katherine McLoughlin, aftersales director at LSH Auto; Neil Addley, managing director of JudgeService and Fraser Bryce, managing director at Dicksons of Inverness.
Across the four interviews which first appeared in AM’s Running A Modern Dealership report, one message lands again and again: retention is not a single tactic. It is a discipline. It starts with how the business is organised, how teams communicate, and how consistently the dealership delivers on the promises it makes.
Measure dealer retention
For industry veteran Wiseman, the first step is to stop pretending the industry can agree one universal number that proves whether a retailer is doing a good job. Measurement, he says, should be specific to the business or group and used to determine a measure set of actions for improvement.
He says: “Every business will have a slightly different metric and timeframe and its own set of benchmarks. It changes by location, by franchise and by factors such as how long the business has been on the site or even practicalities like the size of the car park.”
That argument is not a rejection of measurement. It is a demand for measurement that matches the real operating environment of each specific site and franchise.
Wiseman’s view is that retention efforts become performative when they are designed to satisfy a generic target rather than fix what customers actually experience.
“It’s important to look at retention as more than service retention. You should look at it through the sales journey, the service journey, and then at resale when you’re selling the second and third car,” he says.
Those improvements, in his telling, can be surprisingly mundane. “It could be something as basic as people not being able to park when they arrive. But for me, contact is paramount: how and when you contact customers,” he says.
Retention, then, is won by operational competence that feels personal and by communication that keeps the relationship alive between transactions.
Break down silos
That same point, from a different angle, sits at the heart of Katherine McLoughlin’s thinking. As aftersales director at LSH Auto, she argues that one of the industry’s biggest barriers to loyalty is organisational, not motivational.
“The reality is that one of the biggest barriers to keeping customers loyal is how we are structured internally,” she says. “Most dealerships don’t operate as one business. We operate as several.
New car sales, used car sales, service and parts all sitting in their own lanes, each with their own targets and pressures.” The customer, of course, does not care. Customers don’t see departments. They see one roof,” McLoughlin says.
Yet too often, the voice they hear is a summary handoff.
“How often do we hear ‘that’s sales’ or ‘aftersales will be able to help with that,’ or ‘I’ll just pop you through to another team’? No one is being unhelpful on purpose, but what the customer hears is, ‘this isn’t my problem’.”
McLoughlin’s view is that retention is not owned by aftersales alone because loyalty is the result of every interaction. She prescribes a deliberate shift away from seeing roles as narrowly functional.
“Last year I made a conscious effort to begin to change how I view our people’s roles. Instead of seeing teams purely as sales, service or parts, we should be encouraging everyone to think like customer relationship managers,” she says.
It is not a quick transformation. “I’m a realist and this isn’t a project that will complete overnight, but a start was needed,” she adds.
There is a common thread here with Wiseman’s emphasis on contact. Both are arguing for ownership and continuity even when a query crosses internal boundaries.
McLoughlin frames it as mindset and empowerment. “That doesn’t mean everyone has to know the answer to everything, but it does mean everyone takes responsibility for helping the customer get there,” she says. “It’s not about promising the impossible; it’s about starting from a place of willingness rather than limitation.”
Make loyalty easier
If internal structure is one aspect of making loyalty easy, geography is another. Neil Addley, managing director of JudgeService, introduces research findings into the conversation and offers a deceptively simple proposition.
“If you want more loyal customers, start by selling cars closer to home,” he says. That is not just a marketing preference. Addley says the numbers speak for themselves, showing how distance affects behaviour, especially around service plan take-up, which, in turn, makes loyalty more likely.
“Our research shows that it is much more likely that customers will take out a service plan if they are more local than distance sales,” he says. “On average 51% of customers that have bought within five miles will take out a service plan. This falls a little to 47% when customers travel between 5-10 miles, and to 40% if they’ve travelled 10-25 miles.”
The drop becomes more dramatic beyond that: 32% if they’ve travelled 25-50 miles and to only 25% if it’s more than 50 miles. In other words, retention is shaped by where the customer comes from and how realistic it is for them to return. That localness is also why Addley points to an old trade saying: ‘sales sell the first car; service sells the second’.
“In other words, the way the customer is treated in looking after their ‘baby’ has a massive impact on whether they would choose to buy from you again.”
Brand loyalty is acknowledged to have weakened in recent years, pressured by price rises, model line-up changes and a plethora of new entrants. In that context, he argues the differentiator is not a badge, but how well a retailer looks after customers and makes ongoing ownership straightforward.
For franchised groups that have leaned heavily into distance selling, this is an uncomfortable tradeoff, but it is also a clue about where to concentrate retention effort: local search, local targeting and the intelligent use of the existing customer base.
Build trust through culture
Where Addley talks about locality, Fraser Bryce, managing director at Dicksons of Inverness, talks about culture and trust.
In his view, retention starts with how people behave when no one is watching, and whether the business genuinely empowers teams to do the right thing.
“At Dicksons, we believe retention starts with culture. We place complete trust in our team members to think for themselves and do the right thing by the customer. Empowerment isn’t a slogan, it’s daily practice,” he says.
He gives examples that are striking because they are simple and human.
Repeat customers have been allowed to proceed with essential work even when they have forgotten a wallet or handbag, on the basis they will settle the bill as soon as possible.
Bryce says they always do. He also describes colleagues spending time having coffee with customers in the showroom lounge without fear that senior management will question productivity. “Building relationships is not seen as a distraction from the job; it is the job,” he says.
But Bryce is not arguing for a soft, unstructured approach. In fact, he insists empowerment works best when paired with standards that keep the experience consistent.
“Empowerment works best when it sits alongside clear expectations. We embed standards around response times, communication and ownership,” he says. “Every customer should know who their contact is and they should never have to chase us for information. Trust your team, but give them a framework to operate within.”
That combination of warmth and discipline leads him to the same lever as Wiseman: communication.
Bryce takes a customer-led approach to how updates are delivered, asking customers how often they want to hear from the dealership and by what method. He explicitly links this to the new expectations shaped by wellknown consumer brands.
“Businesses such as Uber, Amazon and Just Eat have reset expectations around transparency and real-time updates,” he says. “Our industry can sometimes behave as though it’s the customer’s responsibility to stay in touch with the dealer. We take the opposite view: it’s our responsibility to keep them informed.”
There is a tactical simplicity to his recommendation that mirrors his cultural stance. He suggests a 24-hour follow-up call after service or repair, not as a sales attempt, but as a relationship builder and an early warning system for dissatisfaction.
The question is deliberately plain: “Is everything exactly as you expected?”
Bryce says that single touchpoint turns a transaction into a relationship and gives the business a chance to resolve small concerns before they escalate.
Retain between transactions
If there is a single conclusion that spans these insights, it is that the industry’s retention challenge is not solved by one tool, one department or one number.
It is solved by aligning the business around the customer’s reality: a desire for straightforward interactions, clear ownership, proactive communication and human-centred service experiences that feel trustworthy rather than transactional.
Wiseman is wary of automation which, he suspects, strips out the essential human conversation customers still value. “You can see it with automated booking systems where customers drop their keys in and walk out,” he says.
“A lot of those are being switched off now because customers don’t like them, much preferring ‘while it’s here, can you just…’ moments where they can talk to someone and feel confident that they’ve been listened to.”
McLoughlin, too, sees experience as the differentiator. “As products become more similar and customers have more choice than ever, experience is what will set retailers apart,” she says.
Addley’s emphasis on local marketing and database use also fits here. Technology, for him, is not a magic retention machine, but a way to concentrate effort where loyalty is most likely to form: close to the dealership.
Underneath all of this sits a shared warning about confusing effective retention with last-minute campaigns.
Bryce calls it out directly: “A common mistake in retention strategy is focusing too heavily on renewal points. Re-engaging customers only when their finance agreement is ending is often too late.
Retention is built between transactions, not at the moment of replacement.”
Wiseman echoes that idea in his insistence that the work is steady and incremental, grounded in the fundamentals of measurement, capability and consistency. “It starts with setting your baseline, then building a real, manageable, measurable action plan to move forward in small increments.” This feature first appeared in AM’s Running A Modern Dealership report.
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