Service Customer Retention

[David Cates]

Does anyone have or know of any benchmarking for service customer retention?

I have been asked by several dealers to do this as part of my customer and vehicles database analysis. The information is easy to get, and the analysis is pretty straightforward, I just don't really have any statistics to compare the data to, or any criteria to know what is really good or bad.

Does anyone really care about this?

[robc]

Do you mean what % of customers return? I guess that always has to be taken from the sales start? Like if I buy a car today what is the chance I'll revisit the service department in the next six months?

Nothing I've ever seen has been that exact. At best I can tell you loyalty to the brand, but that doesn't mean service work was performed there, nor does it mean they rebought at the same store.

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** Rob, Editor Dealersedge/WD&S **
Help is only a message post away!
robc@dealersedge.com

[David Cates]

yes, what percentage return, and keep coming back to the dealership for service on the vehicle purchased, and ulitmately repeat purchases

We're just trying to look at different things like "who purchased a new car and never returned to the dealership", and things like that, in order to determine how effective we are at selling our service department to our new and used car buyers, and how effective we are at taking control of our customers

[jazdale]

Dave
Being ex-ADP, I think this may help.
In the VEHICLES file (service logon) is all the customers and their vehicles.

Three fields (dict items) come into play.
1. The salesman field to show that the car was purchased here, not just a visiting customer
2. The delivery date
3. The last entry date.

Moving the detail into Excel would allow you to subtract the delivery date from the entry date to produce number of days between the two dates. Zero = never came back.
From here, you could 'bracket' the detail with a zero bracket, 1-90, 91-180, etc. Then produce a percentage for each bracket.

[David Cates]

Thanks, but I was looking for any type of industry data for relevance and comparison purposes. I have no idea if "30%" retention is good or bad, because I really have nothing to compare it to. The dealer says good, based on our criteria for what an "active customer" is, but I think he's just guessing really.

I am ex-ADP myself