This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily on August 25, 2017

JOHOR BARU: Naza Kia Malaysia Sdn Bhd is pushing forward a four-pronged aftersales strategy to increase Kia vehicles’ rate of returning customers to 50% by 2020, from 30% presently.

This is concurrent with the group’s target to increase sales of Kia vehicles to 15,000 units in 2020, from 4,378 in 2016, said Naza Corp Holdings Sdn Bhd automotive group chief executive officer Datuk Samson Anand George.

“We want to go back to our glory days, when we took up to 7% of total industry volume. The customer retention programme is key to that, alongside releases of new models and our aggressive expansion in [Sabah and Sarawak] beginning this year,” said Samson at a media roundtable here yesterday.

The strategies, said Samson, are aimed at improving customer experience after purchasing Kia cars, as well as to address the issue of maintenance cost and depreciation of its cars as compared to its competitors, among others.

Part of the customer retention programme includes the development of the CRM360 customer management system, a digital customer service platform for quicker and more comprehensive aftersales services, such as addressing customer feedback.

Moving on, the company is also introducing Kia Cares, an insurance coverage at purchase value — as opposed to market value — for premium models.

Last year, Naza Kia, together with its principal, introduced Kia Value 5. A customer can buy a select Kia model, use it for five years and change to another new Kia at a discount equivalent to 50% of the sale price of the five-year-old car.

As a follow-up to that, it will also launch Kia Confidence, an authorised seller network which will sell second-hand Kia vehicles with a one-year or 20,000km mileage warranty.

The company sold 2,305 Kia units in the first half of calendar year 2017, up 14.4% year-on-year. It has, however, revised its 2017 sales target to 5,100 units from 6,000 earlier amid low customer loan approvals — just about half of customer bookings translated into actual sales this year, said Samson.

“We revised our full-year target as the financial institutions had been stringent on approving auto loans. We will address it with our own financial package, which we hope we can roll out next year,” he added.

Excluding the dealership of luxury vehicle brands, sales of the KIA brand constitute 80% of revenue from Naza Group’s automotive business. The conglomerate is also the official dealer of Peugeot cars, alongside its own Naza brand.