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“It started in 2005, ran through last year and will continue into 2008. Customer satisfaction is something we are intent on. We believe if we share all the issues with our retail staff and management, we can resolve them. Then our customers will get true satisfaction,” said Kelly, who moved to Mercedes-Benz from Audi UK in 1999 and now also has responsibility for sales and marketing of Smart and Maybach.
Kelly, who chairs the SMMT car section committee, worked for Ford after gaining a BA in marketing and mechanical engineering in 1976. As UK director of Skoda he helped relaunch the brand in the 1990s.
What is the current size of the Mercedes network?
We have 27 partners and 156 outlets and we have no plans for this to increase. We own 27 per cent of the network with sites in the big three metropolitan areas – in London inside the M25, Birmingham and Manchester – and 11 Mercedes-Benz Direct used car outlets. These are significant used car retailers, handling about 14,000 cars per year. They play a big role.
What is the role of Mercedes-Benz World?
We conceived the idea for this development at Brooklands seven years ago because we thought the market would change as more people looked to the internet for information but would still need to have a brand experience. In parallel with the rejuvenation of our network in terms of new facilities, we wanted to demonstrate Mercedes-Benz in terms of history and current activities such as motor sport and also show the full product capabilities.
How do you actually show product capability?
By product capability I mean a lot of the new safety elements that are built into our cars – features such as ProSafe can only really be demonstrated on a handling circuit. At the same time we want more people to see the brand and felt having a permanent motor show was the way to do that.
Was it an expensive move?
Yes and no. This year, more people will visit Brooklands than the total who paid to go to the British Motor Show. At the current rate, we will have up to 280,000 visitors – and they will only be looking at Mercedes-Benz.
The beauty of it is that we have two businesses there. Our brand showcase is not only open to visitors, it is also used by firms for exhibitions and product launches. They hire the facility and buy into track driving and the off-road circuit, so people look at new computer products and then have exposure to our cars.
Mercedes-Benz Brooklands is the retail outlet. We merged three dealerships into this site, which has a 32-bay workshop and is also a Mercedes McLaren centre of excellence.
Are you finding that a growning number of people are using the internet?
What we thought would happen has proved to be true. With every third or fourth purchase, customers may go along to Brooklands to see the cars, the heritage, have the technology explained in cutaways and talk to experts. This should give them a re-injection of the brand values.
How will that relate to sales?
This should make them feel that the next time they buy, they can go on to the web, do their research and buy their car. In the US, 25 per cent of customers bought their cars over the web last year. This year the figure has risen to almost 30 per cent – people are not going to a dealership at all and are having the cars delivered to their homes.
They are doing this because they have confidence in the product and the brand. We are providing that confidence from a combination of our retailers and ourselves. Our retailers have spent more than £500m on network development in the past five years. I would boast that we have the most up-to-date network in the Mercedes world and possibly of any brand in the UK.
Can you give any examples?
Our dealers have made big undertakings. Recently a 31-car showroom opened in Edinburgh. It has a 150-car pitch for used models and the site is one third of a mile long. It’s the biggest facility outside Brooklands. Then we have the Sytner-owned Mercedes-Benz Bristol, which is a four-acre site and just as large. Our retailers are pushing their facilities to new levels to give better customer service and attract new people.
Do you have objectives for market share?
We don’t give forecasts for volumes. We are a premium manufacturer in a premium market sector that has more entrants all the time, whether historic smaller brands from the UK or other German marques that are aspirational. It’s a competitive set. Our volume is relatively stable. Obviously, we would like to grow it but our objective is to be profitable and also for customers to buy our brand because they are buying into the brand values.
How do you feel about Audi overtaking Mercedes in the UK two years ago?
It’s not my objective to beat Audi on volume. I’m not here to shell out large volumes of A3s or whatever – that’s not the nature of our portfolio or what we do. We have launched the CL luxury coupe this year. It is at the top end of our model range and is giving us back share from new aspirants in the market.
Down the range is the new C-Class, which is strong on two of our brand values by being dynamic and comfortable and we will work on that. The car has been well received – more than 1,000 guests went to the dealers’ launch in Bristol. A significant number of test drives are booked, the car is off to a good start and it has good prospects. We showed it to 1,000 corporate customers at Mercedes-Benz World and have worked hard to make sure all the information has been out in good time. But the key to our success is the fact we have 15 model lines – we have a slice of every segment.
Do you have any headaches over customer satisfaction?
We had issues in the past about product quality. These were well documented but we are over that now and it shows in our warranty claims, which are significantly lower. We have two ways to measure this. The first is our internal new car buyers survey. We ask 11 primary questions and our position is fifth – the highest we’ve ever been in sales satisfaction. Then there’s JD Power, and we’re pleased with the results for last year, which showed we were 11th overall and up from 15th position in 2005.
How are you raising standards?
There have been several programmes on CS but our primary one is called Class Leaders on the Road. It’s a campaign that started in 2005, when we went out with a series of roadshows and visited all our retailers, made presentations to 9,000 staff in the network and encouraged them to give us their views after showing them what customers thought of Mercedes-Benz which told us how to do to improve customer satisfaction.