In our latest Autoflows podcast, Paul Bennett, automotive advisor with over 25 years of experience in retention SaaS, sat down with Nicholas Malcolm, CEO of Autoflows.
Drawing on a survey of 559 European dealerships, the conversation made one thing clear: aftersales is the only profit engine left, but most dealers cannot quantify what they are losing.
Here are four ideas from the discussion that every dealer principal, COO, and aftersales director should be thinking about right now.
1. Aftersales Is the Real Profit Engine
2. Where Retention Breaks
3. The Real Issue Is Visibility
4. Start With A Retention Audit
With new car margins compressed and finance commissions under pressure across Europe, the aftersales department has become the #1 driver for growth.
When boards ask how to increase margins, the answer is to put the spotlight on aftersales, which generates three to four times more profit per revenue than new car sales.
"There is only a limited amount of profit one can take out of a new car sale. The aftersales department is really a pot of gold. A gold mine."
Paul Bennett,
Automotive Advisor
Paul shared the story of a recent dealer group analysis. A third of the customer database had quietly stopped coming back for service, and none of it was visible until someone looked.
As Paul pointed out, this is the pattern across the industry: the warranty expires, the independents pick the customer up, and the dealer never sees it happen.
"There's a great point of leakage when the manufacturer's warranty expires. As the car gets older, vehicles leak from the network, and the opportunity for spend, which increases disproportionately with age, is lost along with it."
Paul Bennett,
Automotive Advisor
Customers leave exactly when their cars are getting older and revenue per visit should increase, so the dealer loses the most profitable years of the relationship without ever realizing it.
Aftersales teams are not the problem. They are under pressure from multiple angles and doing their best with what they can see. The real issue is structural: without visibility into the customer database, no one can act, engage, or be held accountable.
The fix is not finger-pointing at what happened before. It is drawing a line in the sand and committing to a measured, visible approach going forward.
"Let's not do the blame game. No one's doing something wrong. Because if we are not measuring, we are not acting."
Nicholas Malcolm,
CEO at Autoflows
The conversation closed on a practical question: where do you start?
Paul and Nicholas agreed on the same answer, a Retention Audit. Not a complex project, not a new tool to roll out. Just a clear look at what's actually happening in your aftersales database, so you can measure the retention gap before deciding how to act.
"You can't manage what you can't measure, and you can't measure something until you know what you are measuring. An audit would be a very fine way to proceed with it."
Paul Bennet,
Automotive Advisor
Research based on 500+ European dealers suggests that a 10% improvement in aftersales retention drives 30% revenue growth.
The Retention Audit is what turns a general feeling that "we should do something about aftersales" into a real number the board can act on.
The conversation kept coming back to one idea: aftersales retention is no longer an operational detail, it's a strategic priority.
Dealer groups that act on it now will protect their most profitable customers. The ones that don't will keep losing them, year after year.