Nissan has been gradually rolling out a series of business specialist dealers, designed to boost its fleet performance with large companies.
UK MD Jim Wright said: “We’re calling these ‘business centre plus’. These are dealers who have signed up to an enhanced range of customer service propositions in terms of turnaround times, workshop opening hours, courtesy cars the same spec as the car that has been brought in, and so forth. We’re pretty much on target and should have 25 by the end of the year.”
He said the firm has performed well with SME business in the past but has been less successful in winning contracts with big corporates, citing the following reasons: “We haven’t had the right organisation structure to manage that type of business, both in the network and in Nissan, so we changed the network. and earlier this year we changed the structure of our corporate field team so we have more people on the ground.
“The second part is because historically we’ve never been strong in that market; it’s really quite difficult to break into. There are long-established relationships the buyers tend to have. Behaviour change is very slow, so again, we need to address that and we are through having more people.”
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