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Only four dealers across the UK have achieved Vauxhall’s Customer Service Award in four consecutive years, and one of them is a small rural outlet on the south west coast of Wales.
Celebrating 65 years on the same site, just outside Pembroke Dock, WP Lewis & Son is on track to exceed CI scores of 93.7% for both sales and aftersales and achieve a fifth consecutive award.
The centre’s long history has also just been marked by an Automotive Achievement Award from the Welsh Motoring Writers.
It’s a far cry from when WP Lewis first opened a “tin shack” in 1950 selling fuel and servicing agricultural equipment. WP was later joined by his son Stuart and the company grew to become an Opel sales outlet in 1976 before evolving into a full Vauxhall dealer franchise in 1981.
Leading the business today is Steve Lloyd, WP’s grandson, who joined the company in 1981 as a car valeter. Within 18 months he was managing the fuel station forecourt and then the company’s used car site at Milford Haven alongside his uncle Stuart. In 2012, following his uncle’s passing, Steve took over as managing director and is undergoing Vauxhall training to achieve retail operator qualifications.
How have you achieved the standards needed to win Vauxhall’s Customer Service Award?
We are well-established. Few people in Pembrokeshire won’t know our name. Both WP and Stuart had honesty, integrity and humility in bucket loads. WP was a churchgoing man and founder member of our choir that continues today, Stuart was very involved in the junior section of local rugby. That’s how we still grow our business, we know the people around our area and they come to us when they want cars.
We have few customer complaints. We tackle any problems immediately; if it goes above the level of sales or aftersales to me I deal with it very quickly. Our company motto is ‘Our reputation is
your guarantee’ and that is something we don’t take lightly.
Recently I had a phone call on a Sunday from a customer who was in Birmingham and couldn’t start his car. I talked him through potential faults and he managed to start it, but I told him to phone back if he had further problems and I would go and get him.
He got home and came in to have the fault sorted on the Monday. I know all my staff would do that – they are like family members to me and I couldn’t run this business without them.
You have a low staff turnover so when you do recruit is it hard to find the right personnel?
We’ve recently taken on three new staff members, all under 19. It takes a special type of person to fit into our dealership but because we are so well known in the community and know our customers, we tend to know the people we are recruiting before they come to us – for example the grandfather of one of our new staff members has been a customer for 40 years.
How do you market to such a rural community?
All of our demonstrators are sign-written and we add the current marketing campaign to our courtesy cars as they tend to stay in the local area. We do a fair bit of traditional advertising in the Western Telegraph daily newspaper – this is declining but we have gone on the paper’s new website.
We’ve greatly increased our presence at local agricultural shows and also at supermarkets. Getting out into the community is crucial.
Vauxhall’s new scrappage scheme is a major marketing initiative – how is this working for you?
It’s been a success. The market had gone very quiet and this kicked off a big turnaround. However, I fear the initial take-up will be immediate from those whose cars are at the end of their life and see how good the deal is, and then it will tail off. The free fuel promotion every quarter is not having the same success it has in the past. I do think that there is an opportunity to bring
in conquest customers – three of the seven cars we’ve sold so far on scrappage have been conquest.
How did the dropping of Vauxhall’s Lifetime Warranty programme impact your business?
It’s too early to say really but we have noticed it on sales. Many of our customers are retirees who buy cars on 0% deals – we don’t see a lot of PCP business. When we held an evening sales push to refresh our database in Q2 many customers didn’t want to give up their 0% deal on their existing car because it had Lifetime Warranty. It won’t affect those on PCP deals who regularly change their cars but it could affect us more going forward.
What impact has the Zafira dashboard fire safety recall had on your business.
The BBC Watchdog programme got hold of the story before Vauxhall had time to carry out an investigation which is still going on but it looks like an aftermarket thermostat part could be responsible.
I cannot speak highly enough of my team. Within an hour of receiving the first phone calls, aftersales had broken their day sheet into two, with our foreman tasked every hour on the hour to carry out the checks Vauxhall requires. Everyone was trained to pass all calls to aftersales who knew exactly what to advise.
We’ve seen around 120 cars with just one being taken off the road, and we are only getting praise from our customers. The owner of the car kept back was put into a Mokka courtesy car and she immediately pasted a picture of it on the Facebook site set up by concerned Zafira owners. This resulted in other owners asking who her dealer was, as we were clearly giving the best service, so we’ve been seeing people who have never bought cars from us.
As this is a safety recall we are also taking the opportunity to do a winter check on each car, free of charge. Any dealer who doesn’t is frankly naive.
How has the last year been for you, and what do you predict for 2016?
Like every dealer, our targets have been pushed up over the last year, but we’ve achieved target in the last three quarters and we think we will this quarter. Due to our locality we only do genuine retail sales – we haven’t got the buying capacity to pre-register, and it has not been an easy year, we are coping with a reduced profit margin.
Going forward we must continue to hit target, as we’ll need to invest in CI standard upgrades, possibly in Q2 next year. We need the profit going in to do that – it’s a huge investment for us as a small dealer.
Rory Harvey (pictured), the new Vauxhall managing director, has made it fairly plain that our targets will rise again next year because he believes the market will go up again. We will have a full year of Viva sales, the new Astra and the new On Star system, while we also have a couple of updates coming on other models. We are in no doubt, however, that we have another hard year coming in 2016.
FACTFILE
WP Lewis & Son
Established: November 1950, with Vauxhall since 1981
Brand: Vauxhall
Location: Pembroke Dock (plus multi-franchise used car centre in Milford Haven)
Staff: 24, 12 in aftersales
Ramps: 4 plus 1 MoT
Andrew Charman
