What Two Visitors From England Found in Copenhagen
Nicholas, CEO of Autoflows, with Marc and Maz, who lead our AI implementation work - hosting Paul Bennett and Steve Nash for the first of three conversations.
This week Paul and Steve flew in from England to spend a few days inside Autoflows. Not for a sales pitch, but to sit with the people actually building the product and ask the questions any dealer group should ask before signing anything. Steve brings 26 years at BMW and a career spent chasing consistency across dealer networks. Paul, Managing Partner at Madox Square Advisory, works across automotive finance, mobility and regulatory strategy – and turning exactly this kind of complexity into commercial opportunity. We split their visit into three separate conversations with three different teams. This first one, with our CEO Nicholas and the two people who lead our AI and data work, Marc and Maz, started with the objection nearly every dealer group leads with: “I already have my data. What can you possibly do better with it than I already can?”
Nicholas Malcolm: Let's start there, because it's the one every prospect leads with. Say I run a dealer group, I've got a DMS full of service records - what are you going to tell me I'm missing?
Marc Bauer: We started by looking at retention as one outcome on its own. The deeper we went, the more it unveiled other gaps - inconsistent service dates, a funnel gap in how follow-up gets organised, a booking gap in how capacity and diaries are managed. Together, that's what we call the after sales gap. Most groups assume that if a service date gets logged every time a customer comes in, the data is accurate. When we re-evaluate every invoice - cross-referencing line items and menu descriptions rather than trusting the stored date - we regularly find records off by months. Mileage prediction alone accounts for 20 to 30% of all our service predictions - that's how many customers would otherwise drop out of the call pot entirely, because on paper they don't look due yet.
Steve Nash: That tracks with what I saw for years - whenever we looked closely at a dealer's data, it was never as good as they thought. My own car went in for its first service and they told me it needed two rear tyres they didn't have in stock. Rather than sort it properly, they sent me down the road to a tyre shop. That's not a data problem - that's the gap between what the system knows and what actually happens on the day.
Marc Bauer: Once the prediction is right, it comes down to orchestration - who owns the journey, who follows up. Often that sits with marketing, but after sales communication is a different discipline entirely - it's relational, not spray-and-pray. There's a narrow window where a reminder is relevant, and if you're off by twenty or thirty days, you've lost it. A simple DVLA and DVSA check also removes people who shouldn't be in the pot at all - one group dialling roughly 10,000 customers a year found that cleansing the list didn't increase bookings, it just delivered the same result for meaningfully less effort.
Steve Nash: In 26 years at BMW, after sales got maybe two slides out of an eighty-slide board deck. Now they're struggling to hit 1% return on sales, and suddenly it's the thing everyone's focused on.
Paul, whose work sits at the intersection of automotive finance, M&A and regulatory strategy, framed it in commercial terms: after sales used to be the department nobody fought over. Now it's the department everyone wants to own - and ownership, he pointed out, is exactly where the commercial opportunity sits.
To make it concrete, Marc and Maz pulled up a live client account inside the Autoflows platform: Eden Motor Group, one of the larger dealer groups on our books. Rather than describe the after sales gap in the abstract, they let Paul and Steve watch it close in real time - invitations going out, calls landing, appointments dropping straight into the diary.
Maz Katinas: Over this period we've contacted roughly 85,000 customers across email, SMS and voice, at an average 44% conversion. When we say booked, we mean an actual appointment created in the calendar - that's roughly £11 to £12 million in booked value for this one group. We showed them a Vauxhall recall too: 2,000 vehicles, a repair that barely covers the technician's time, the kind of list dealers have no appetite to work. We cleansed it down to 1,200 real, current owners and booked the appointments directly - no contact centre, no chasing.
Maz Katinas: And it's not just the numbers - Jemca Toyota signed the contract without ever hearing a single demo call. What we pitched them on was the data layer and the DMS integration, not how the voice sounded. Ellie's not just a name, either - we named her after someone on the Jemca team, and gave her a regional accent to match, because the whole point was for her to sound like she actually belonged there.
Marc played the recording. Ellie answered as “an automated assistant,” recognised the caller by phone number, pulled up his vehicle and mileage, booked the right service, corrected a wrong email address, and quoted a fixed price - all in under two minutes.
Paul Bennett: That's more natural than a lot of what I've heard. And commercially, that's the part that matters - the upsell at the end is exactly the kind of margin most dealers leave on the table. Nearly twelve million pounds isn't to be sneezed at, either.
Nicholas Malcolm: We're not selling AI. We're closing the gap, and AI is just the fastest way to do it once you know where the leak actually is. Personalisation is what drives retention, and retention is what drives the profit.
By the end of the morning, Paul and Steve had heard the same story from three angles — the data, the ownership, and the proof. What stuck with them both on the way out wasn't the AI itself, they said, but how much of the gap turns out to be process rather than technology. Their next stop was with Kasper, on a different kind of gap: how much of the customer experience gets diluted before a dealership ever gets a say in it.
“AI is not the strategy. The retention gap is.”