Customer loyalty increases profit, improves sales success, and gives dealerships a foundation for sustainable growth. Keeping an existing customer costs 5 to 25 times less than acquiring a new one, according to Harvard Business Review.
Our workshop data puts a figure on what that means for aftersales. A connected vehicle aged 8 years or older, active for 36 months, produced 57% more workshop throughput than a comparable non-connected vehicle. Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles Denmark, running the same platform, reported up to an 86% revenue increase on cars seven years and older.
The warranty holds a customer for the first few years. After that, nothing does unless you build it. Four things make the difference:
- Know what your customers now expect from a service experience
- Connect the vehicle so it tells you what it needs
- Move from reactive to proactive service using that data
- Measure retention in throughput, not satisfaction scores
Why do dealerships lose customers once the warranty expires?
Most dealerships struggle to retain customers after the warranty period passes. A vehicle produces little throughput in its first several years beyond the services the warranty already covers. It becomes the aftersales department’s greatest asset as it ages, through more parts, more faults and higher invoice value, a pattern we mapped by car-age segment, and that is exactly the point where most dealerships lose it.
Three factors compound the problem:
- No loyalty program. Most dealerships do not run one, so nothing structured brings the customer back.
- No infrastructure to track customers. When someone stops booking, no system notices or follows up.
- No visibility into the vehicle. Without vehicle data, you learn about a fault when the customer reports it, and by then they may have called an independent workshop instead.
The result is a significant and largely invisible loss of profit. It does not show up as a complaint. It shows up as an empty bay.
Connected Carsโ research among Volkswagen workshops shows that customer loyalty decreases significantly over time
What do aftersales customers expect today?
Start with the trends shaping what your customers expect. As the world becomes more digital, people want service that is quick, convenient, and personalized. Hybrid service is the baseline now rather than a differentiator.
Research by BearingPoint found that 70% of customers value personalized offers for their vehicle. The same study found customers would rather receive information by email or through their driver app than by phone, and that the preference for app notifications is strongest among younger drivers.
Three touchpoints matter most:
- Service offers based on the vehicle’s actual condition rather than a generic mailing
- Consistent follow-up after a visit
- Communication through the channel the customer chose
Personalization, clear communication, and relevant offers are what keep a customer from drifting to an independent workshop.
How does connectivity change aftersales?
Vehicles have become smartphones on wheels, which gives your dealership something it never had: a continuous view of the car between visits.
Vehicle-generated data benefits the dealership and the customer at once. Customers stay informed about their vehicle, and the workshop predicts maintenance instead of reacting to it. In practice, connected car technology does three jobs:
- Targeted campaigns. Promote a service to the vehicles that actually need it, which raises upsell rates and cuts wasted contact.
- A direct channel. A driver app becomes a standing point of contact rather than an annual reminder letter.
- Online booking. Customers book themselves, which suits them and reduces phone time for your team.
Reactive vs. proactive service
| Reactive service | Proactive service | |
|---|---|---|
| Trigger | Customer notices a fault | System flags a developing fault |
| Who makes contact | Customer calls you | You call the customer |
| Timing | After the problem exists | Before it becomes a breakdown |
| Scheduling | Fits into whatever slot is free | Planned into workshop capacity |
| Customer experience | Disruption, then repair | No disruption |
Dealerships running connected car technology can work the second way because service advisors automate customer management from vehicle data. We broke down the economics of that shift in proactive vs. reactive: the ROI of automotive predictive maintenance.
What proactive service looks like in practice:
Battery health data is available in real time in a connected vehicle. If a battery is persistently low in voltage or steadily depleting, ConnectedWorkshop notifies the dealership. The service advisor contacts the customer and resolves it before the car fails to start on a Monday morning. A low battery voltage lead is one of the simplest ways to turn vehicle data into booked work.
The customer gets something more valuable than a repair. They stop worrying about the unforeseen, which in a fast-paced life is worth a great deal. A service that reliably removes that worry is a service people keep using.
What it looks like for a service advisor
Kim Nรธhr Pedersen is a commercial service advisor at Autocentralen Horsens. He uses ConnectedWorkshop to watch his whole fleet of commercial vehicles at once, tracking fault codes and upcoming service needs so he can act before the phone rings. At this year’s VWE Brand Day he was named Service Advisor of the Year, ahead of every other commercial service advisor in the network, and his team took Commercial Team of the Year.
When a gap opens in the schedule, he looks through the fleet overview for vehicles approaching a service interval or showing a fault code.
We use Connected Cars to constantly optimize lift capacity. Instead of waiting for them to call, I take action myself.
Kim Nรธhr Pedersen, service advisor, Autocentralen Horsens
The reaction from customers is the part that matters for loyalty. “Customers have it in the back of their mind, they just haven’t gotten around to it,” Kim says. “When you call, it’s usually a relief for the customer.” The same data removes wasted trips: “We can tell the customer what’s wrong with their vehicle before they’ve even reached the workshop. They don’t need to drive thirty minutes for nothing, just so we can run the same scan we could already run remotely.” Read the full case study.
Does connectivity actually improve retention? A real-life example
Customers satisfied with your service keep coming back. Connected vehicles let us put a number on how much.
A connected vehicle aged 8 years or older, active for 36 months, produced 57% more throughput than a comparable non-connected vehicle.
Throughput here means workshop revenue generated by that vehicle. On the oldest segment of the car park, a 57% gap is the difference between a vehicle that has effectively left your business and one still contributing to it.
Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles Denmark saw the same pattern at brand level after rolling out ConnectedWorkshop, reporting up to an 86% revenue increase on cars seven years and older. Two different measurements, the same conclusion: connectivity pays most on the oldest vehicles, which are the ones dealerships usually lose.
Conclusion
A few strategies do most of the work. Understanding your customer and building a relationship with them is the foundation of long-term success, and digitization has made both far easier than they were. Remote diagnostics turns that understanding into proactive service, and the throughput data shows it holds customers well past the point where the warranty stops doing it for you.
Connected Cars works with more than 700 workshops across 40+ brands, on over 300,000 connected vehicles. If you want to see what that data looks like for your own car park, get in touch.
Frequently asked questions
Because nothing structured replaces the warranty as a reason to return. Most dealerships have no loyalty program, no system that notices when a customer stops booking, and no visibility into the vehicle between visits, so a fault becomes the independent workshop’s opportunity rather than theirs.
Proactive service means identifying a developing fault from vehicle data and contacting the customer before it becomes a breakdown, rather than waiting for them to report a problem. A common example is battery health: real-time voltage data flags a depleting battery, and the service advisor schedules the replacement in advance.
Yes. In Connected Cars’ workshop data, a connected vehicle aged 8 years or older and active for 36 months produced 57% more workshop throughput than a comparable non-connected vehicle.
Older vehicles are the aftersales department’s most valuable segment, because vehicles under warranty generate little throughput beyond covered services. Retention on the 8-year-plus segment is where aftersales profit is won or lost.
Speed, convenience, and personalization. BearingPoint found 70% of customers value personalized offers for their vehicle, and that customers prefer email or driver-app contact over the phone, most strongly among younger drivers.