The Problem

Due to overall industry factors, dealership leaders needed to maximize service retention and boost aftersales revenue to compensate for a deficiency in new vehicle sales. Beyond that, as part of a major OEM’s corporate program, they recognized a need to put strong focus on increasing customer pay work with the goal of 100% service absorption.

The Solution

SERVICEVIEW™

Dealership leaders recognized an opportunity to utilize all available service data and insights to inform customer targeting and campaign strategies. They leveraged insights from both their DMS and our ServiceView™ solution to identify, prioritize and capture opportunities in their market. They focused their campaigns on three strategic pillars:

1.) Promoting current parts inventory and lucrative service repair orders
2.) Leveraging the OEM’s corporate monthly aftersales programs
3.) Utilizing customer mileage or last service date to trigger service reminders

The dealership used ServiceView™ weekly to identify top opportunities and create action plans and highly targeted service campaigns. In fact, dealership leaders created three action plans per month versus the average of one plan for other dealerships in the market. From there, the dealership consistently tracked the effectiveness of campaigns by monitoring the following key performance and operational metrics:

  • Monthly performance metrics measured retention and dealership service loyalty.
  • Weekly operational metrics measured service repair order revenue conversion rates and parts and accessories sales.

The Results

Performance Metrics – Retention Rate:

  • 20pp higher than market average in service retention rates (80.4% versus the market average at 60.7%)
  • 38pp higher than national service retention rates (80.4% versus the national average of 42.6%)

Operational Metrics – Repair Orders (YoY):

  • Increased monthly repair order volume by 39% on average (compared to market average at 12.9%)
  • Of that, they maintained nearly 94% customer pay work average (compared to market average at 91% and national average at 86%)

Bottom Line

  • Dealership profitability (EBIT) more than doubled YoY to 18% (by December YTD)
  • When accounting for addition efforts to control operational expenses, service absorption increased 14pp YoY

Conclusion

Despite its small size – through the power of our data and scientific approach to drive efficiency and profitability for our clients – this dealership was able to identify its most meaningful service-related opportunities and generate truly impressive results. In fact, the dealership’s performance was so strong that it positively impacted the entire market, which saw a 20 pp increase in service retention compared to markets not utilizing ServiceView with the same frequency.