NISSAN is hoping to improve customer retention levels with a five-point plan for its dealer network.
Called ‘You+ Nissan Care’ the scheme aims to improve sales by ensuring existing customers get the best possible service.
‘The way you retain customers is to deliver them a decent service,’ explained Nissan GB boss Paul Willcox. ‘If you annoy customers and give them poor service, they won’t buy your car again.
‘We wanted to provide a customer promise, a commitment to customers which says that if you come to a Nissan dealership you will get this level of service. We sat down with our dealer association a year ago and worked out what should be in that.’
The scheme is based around five key aspects as Paul Willcox explains here:
Price matching – ‘If a customer has a quote for servicing from a competitor within 50 miles we will price match that assuming they are using Nissan genuine parts. It’s like the Never Knowingly Undersold from John Lewis. It’s a phallacy that franchise dealers are expensive so we had to overcome that.’
Breakdown cover – ‘If customers get their car serviced at a Nissan dealer they’ll get one year’s RAC cover for no cost. Even if it’s a 20-year-old Micra and they come to get it serviced then they pay £129 for the service and get one year’s free RAC cover worth between £80-90. This actively pulls back lapsed customers into dealers.’
Mobility – ‘If their car is off the road for whatever reason, a service or breakdown, then Nissan will guarantee free of charge mobility. That means a courtesy car will be provided for free. That’s basic, but I can’t find any other brand out there that does that for free.’
Customer cars – ‘This is about customers being able to get a test drive in the car they want. We’ve stopped the concept of demonstrator and courtesy cars in dealers and created one fleet called customer cars. We’ve worked out how many cars dealers need to run. Dealers can also draw down from a central pool of cars. We’ve increased the support for dealers to do this as it’s a massive opportunity for us to get customers in cars.’
48 hour promise – ‘We will offer customers who have a problem with their car a proposal to resolve it within 48 hours. That doesn’t mean it’ll be fixed in 48 hours but we promise to lay down what we’ll do within 48 hours. That’s from the dealer in conjunction with us. That doesn’t sound huge but if you can deliver on that it has a big impact.’
Nissan has launched You+ Nissan Care as it thinks it’s the best way to ‘grow the business through retention’ Willcox told Car Dealer in an exclusive interview.
‘Our industry is relatively poor at retention in terms of sales and after sales,’ added Willcox. ‘We think if we can improve that significantly then that will sustain growth. We have grown in the last two years and the expectation again is to do that again in 2011, but we know that if we don’t move the bar on in terms of customer loyalty we won’t be able to do that forever.
‘If dealers don’t improve on this then we’ll act. We’ve currently got 10 per cent of the network that we’re parting company with, but the good news is we’re recruiting a lot more. Nissan is moving forward and the network is relatively happy.’
They’ll be more from Car Dealer Magazine’s exclusive chat with Paul Willcox and a review of the 2011 Nissan Micra in the new look edition of Car Dealer Magazine, out in the second week of February.