ABM_1 - Flipbook - Page 38
OPINION
RETAIL
The value of
existing customers
is still overlooked
E
xtraordinary effort is made to
navigate the pace of change
and volatility in today’s market.
But many dealers consistently
overlook their existing customers
as a source of growth. Instead
of nurturing them, they just
keep working harder to find new
ones. It seems that losing touch with
previous customers, because their details
are always changing, is accepted as
inevitable.
A common misconception we
encounter is that fixing the gaps in
customer records is hard. Dealers are
already busy, and focusing effort on
databases that are just about ‘good
enough’, doesn’t seem worth their time.
They’re already up against it, they say,
with a volatile market, massive change
in the product mix they’re selling, and
they’re mostly doing well anyway, even
with these headwinds. So, why worry
about a customer going elsewhere after
they lost touch?
The reality is that they’re missing major
additional revenue, which is achievable
with very little effort or investment.
Our recent analysis of 15 dealer groups
found that they had collectively missed
at least £34.7m over 18 months simply by
allowing customers to lapse.
Based on the experience of dealers,
who have tackled this challenge head
on, we now know that it’s both easy and
highly profitable to improve customer
record-keeping. The numbers speak for
themselves.
The first hurdle is recognising the
problem. Taken in isolation, a proportion
of keeper changes going unrecorded,
a few incorrect MOT reminders sent
to outdated addresses, or even to
38
AUTOMOTIVE BUSINESS Q4 2025
→ Jon Sheard is operations director
at Auto Data Solutions (ADS)
customers who are no longer living,
might seem small beans in the grand
scheme of things. In practice, this adds
up to millions in missed revenue for every
dealer group we have consulted with in
recent years.
It’s surprisingly easy to change.
One of our clients reported that
simply correcting 1,000 erroneous
MOT dates generated more than
£40,000 in workshop revenue over the
following year.
So, we are not talking about marginal
gains from a complex and timeconsuming data infrastructure project.
Time and again we see highly significant
revenue boosts that anyone could
replicate with relatively simple changes.
Poor quality customer data is most
apparent in the handling of safety recalls,
which introduces another dimension to
the issue; the duty of a dealer to keep in
touch with customers.
Earlier this year, through a Freedom
of Information request, we discovered
that between 2018 and 2023, more than
3.2 million cars and vans in the UK were
recalled but never checked. That means
that around one in five customers with a
recalled car are still driving a potentially
unsafe vehicle. The main reason for these
shocking figures is that dealers have
