The strategic risk hiding inside the EV transition
A dealer group does not usually notice the EV problem first in workshop turnover. It notices it in customer contact. The parc shifts. Routine service intervals stretch. Fewer owners return for the familiar maintenance rhythm that used to keep the relationship alive almost by default. By the time workshop revenue starts to move, service retention has often been drifting for quarters.
Too many boards still read aftersales through the lens of utilisation: hours sold, bays filled, technician productivity. Those metrics matter, but they miss the earlier signal. When customers come back less often, the network loses more than labour revenue. It loses reasons to stay relevant, chances to refresh data, moments to reinforce trust, and visibility on who is quietly moving out of the network. The margin pressure starts long before it shows up in workshop revenue.
This is why the strongest networks in increasingly in EV-heavier markets such as the Netherlands, are not simply waiting for the next service event. They are looking for substitute moments that still feel legitimate to the customer: tyre replacement, seasonal checks, recall campaigns, warranty milestones, connected-vehicle prompts, collection-and-delivery offers, upgrade signals. Not every touchpoint works equally well. Some are too generic. Some arrive too late. Some depend on data the network assumes it has, until local inconsistency proves otherwise. That is where the execution problem becomes visible.
Most dealer groups do not struggle because they lack ideas. They struggle because the data is patchy, the cadence varies by rooftop, and customer follow-up is still left to local habit or fragmented systems. In practice, that means contact details not refreshed since handover, service prompts firing in the wrong language, or follow-up that simply never arrives. One dealer calls at the right moment. Another waits. A third sends a message with no relevance at all. At board level, the reporting still looks acceptable because the average hides the leak.
Once the old maintenance rhythm weakens, silence becomes expensive
The customer who no longer hears from you is not just a missed workshop visit. That customer becomes harder to retain, harder to reactivate, and eventually more expensive to win back through sales and marketing. By then, the damage is no longer confined to aftersales. It is affecting lifetime value, future repurchase influence, and the economics of the entire customer relationship.
In the ICE era, customer contact was partly created by the product. In the EV era, it has to be designed, governed, and executed deliberately across the network. That is the calculation many boards still have not run.
