Toyota looks to boost service retention with new 10 year warranty

Toyota (GB) has overhauled its warranty proposition for dealers and customers with the launch of Toyota and Lexus Relax.

This gives Toyota and Lexus owners 12 months/10,000 miles’ cover for their vehicle each time they have it serviced at an official Toyota or Lexus centre.

The warranty is automatically applied and there is no extra cost to the customer.

This “service-activated” warranty can continue until the vehicle reaches 10 years or has covered 100,000 miles.

All Toyota and Lexus models qualify as long the age and mileage criteria are met, including passenger cars and light commercial vans and pick-ups.

Toyota said the warranty should help improve residuals of warranted cars and provide a ‘compelling’ business case for its dealers.

Basically, Toyota and Lexus are hoping that the two brands will retain more servicing work than they do at present.

Although Relax is primarily customer driven, there is a solid business case to be argued, it said.

Currently, for Toyota cars aged 0-3 years, Toyota dealers retain 70% of servicing. For Lexus, it is higher as you would expect from a premium brand.

Thereafter the retention rate tails off, at a faster rate for Toyota than Lexus. In both cases Toyota (GB) hopes Relax will improve performance.

“Fundamentally at its heart this is a consumer experience program for us, this is about making Toyota and Lexus ownership better. A lot of our modelling has been based on how this embeds customers in our customer relationship,” said Matthew Black, brand awareness manager, Toyota (GB).

“Our network is extremely buoyed up and excited about the launch of this proposition as something that will introduce them to a load of new owners that they don’t currently have relationships with. We expect quite significant growth in demand for genuine servicing within the Toyota networks,” he added.