Retention and Reputation

Acquisition gets the budget and retention gets the leftovers, which is strange arithmetic in a business where the same household buys every three or four years and services in between. The customer is rarely lost at the point of sale. They are lost over eighteen months of small things: a service visit that ran long with no phone call, a recall letter that read like a summons, a review left in frustration that nobody answered, and then a mailer arriving to a person who had already decided.

What is collected here covers the service drive as the retention engine, CSI and reviews, and the communication habits that decide whether somebody comes back. Most of these articles are parented in the service drive and direct maillibraries and appear here as pointers — retention is downstream of everything, which is exactly why it deserves a page that gathers it.

Named gaps, so you know what you are not getting: structured loyalty programme design, review generation and response as a discipline, and referral programmes are all thin or absent here and are queued. For the service side of retention, service advisor training is where most of the gain actually comes from, and equity mining is how the existing database gets worked.

Still looking? The frequently asked questions answer the short version of most of this, what dealers say covers the results side, and Auto Industry News is everything we publish in date order. Or start with the full resource index.