While there are certainly a number of areas where millennials can be distinguished from the overall 18+ population in Canada, when it comes to automotive service, there’s an increasing amount of commonality across many topics. It sounds like millennials are growing up.
According to the latest AIA Canada study Understanding Millennial Canadian Vehicle Owners, more than a third of millennials feel helpless bringing their vehicle in for maintenance and repair.
At 36% this is only slightly more than Canadians 18+ at 32%. Notably there is no difference between millennial men and millennial women, both registering at 36%.
So, millennials, who are now as old as 44 and as young as 25, are now dealing with grown up realities of car ownership.
It is curious, however, that while 57% of the overall millennials reported that they are somewhat knowledgeable when it comes to vehicle maintenance and repair, the split is very different: 75% of men said they were somewhat knowledgeable; only 39% of women said they were fairly knowledgeable.
In a nutshell, while men feel they know more, they’re feel just as helpless as women when it comes to automotive service.
Overall, when it comes to the topic of basic maintenance and repair knowledge, it can be stated that millennials are slightly more nervous about their command of what needs being done than the population at large.
Not drastically so though. Some 51% of millennials believe they stay on top of everything as compared to 60% of 18+ Canadians.
For automotive service providers (ASPs), it is interesting to note that maintenance reminders of preference put windshield stickers at 83%, only slightly behind vehicle dashboard messaging at 87%.
In third place was an email reminder at 78%.
Millennials do show a higher affinity for reminders through their smart phones, however. Some 78% would find an app that reminds them of maintenance helpful as opposed to 63% for the national average.
Text message reminders are also at 78% for millennials versus 70% for the national average. This shouldn’t necessarily be too surprising, but it is worth noting for ASPs in terms of how they communicate with their customers.
How millennials rate service outlets provide some bragging rights for the ASP: only 37% said that dealerships outperform ASPs, meaning that a strong majority, 63%, do not feel that dealerships outperform ASPs. Similarly, a minority of millennials believe techs working in dealership are better trained than those in ASPs. Somewhat comforting also is the fact that only 35% of millennials believe their vehicle warranty is nullified if they bring it to an ASP.
On the downside, however, while ASPs are seen to provide value for money more than dealers, neither is viewed to be overwhelmingly the winner on being trustworthy; 34% for ASPs and 30% for dealers.
There’s also no overwhelming winner when it comes to providing quality work, delivering on time, providing customer service, having a helpful service advisor, technical proficiency, etc.
Areas identified that shops could work on as a whole are providing proactive notifications, EV competence, length of warranty on new parts — this sounds more like a communications issue — and having a clean shop.
On that last point only 13% of millennials said that ASP‘s had a cleaner shop than a dealer versus 53% on the dealer side of the balance sheet.
The study contains dozens more data points in its pages, but with trust being such a considerable factor influencing millennials’ behavior, four elements should be noted by ASPs looking to improve their performance on this front:
- 72% of millennials said they would become more trusting if more time we spent explaining the impact of maintenance and repair;
- 70% said they would become more trusting if it was the same technician working on their vehicle;
- 70% would become more trusting if there was better planning for the short, medium, and long-term;
- 59% said they would become more trusting if they received emails and websites explaining scope and importance of maintenance and repair.
This report is free to AIA Canada members, and available to non-members for $99 CAD.
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