From busy to profitable - Autflows Summit 2026

On 20 May 2026, thirteen speakers and a room full of aftersales directors and dealer principals spent a day in Copenhagen. The question on the table was simple: how much aftersales revenue is walking out the door, and why can't most dealers put a number on it?

That's what the Automotive Aftersales Summit set out to answer.

The number the room kept coming back to

Autoflows opened with findings from its Europe-wide benchmark study of 559 dealerships:

• 74% can't say how much aftersales revenue they're currently losing
• 38% have no clear owner for retention. It's "shared across teams," which usually means nobody actually owns it
• 61% have no digital check-in solution, even though most already have the booking and CRM systems to run one
• Retention drops from 100% at year 0 to just 19% by year 8. Retained customers are worth three times more over their lifetime than lost ones

The tools are mostly already there. 86% of dealers have online booking. What's missing is the discipline to use what they've already paid for.

What the day added to the data

Speaking to Automotive Business Magazine after the summit, CEO Nicholas Malcolm set out the standard he thinks dealers should be aiming for: "If I imagine I only had one customer, what's my dream service then? My dream is personal, it's proactive, it's relevant." His point was simple. Most dealers aren't losing customers because they lack the tools. They're losing them because nobody calls the right customer at the right time with something worth saying.

Senior Strategic Sales Partner Per Laredius picked up the measurement side. Most groups, he said, can't answer a basic question about their own business. "We start by asking whether they know their customer retention number, not just at group level, but at location, brand and vehicle level too. Most of them don't," he said. "Once they have that full visibility, they've got a baseline they can actually start to improve from."

The most practical session on the day came from Katherine McLoughlin, Head of Aftersales at LSH Auto UK, who talked about why retention projects fall over in real dealerships. Her view is that the technology usually isn't the problem. "You can invest in the best technology in the world, but if your teams don't understand it or feel supported, it will never deliver its full potential." Before choosing any new system, she asks people at every level, service advisers, technicians, even customers, one question: what's in it for me.

What to do next

1. See the gap. Start tracking lifetime value, not just how often customers visit. Only 16% of dealers who measure retention at all are tracking this.
2. Own the gap. Give one person the retention number and a target. "Shared responsibility" was the most common answer in the benchmark study, and also the most expensive one.
3. Close the gap. Use the pre-visit window to contact customers before they book somewhere else. Right now only 6.2% of dealers do this.

None of this needs a new platform or a big budget. It needs someone in charge who's willing to look at the number honestly. McLoughlin's advice for when people push back on that is worth remembering: "Anger is the green flag for change. If you get nothing but nodding heads, I can guarantee you it's not embedded. If you get people debating the change, hold their hand through that frustration and you will get them to acceptance."

The dealers who leave Copenhagen and actually name someone to own this will be ahead of the pack long before everyone else finishes arguing about whose job it was.

Didn't make it to Copenhagen, or want to revisit a session?

Every presentation from the day, Autoflows' full benchmark findings, Per Laredius on measurement, Katherine McLoughlin's retention playbook, and the rest of the lineup, is available to download, along with photos from the summit.

If you're the person who's about to own the retention number at your dealership, this is the starting material: the slides, the data behind them, and the frameworks speakers walked through live.