After years of promising to set up a specialised fleet dealer network, Seat now says it will have an initial group of 25 dealerships in place by the end of the year.

The network is critical for delivering Seat’s 2012 vision of becoming the “fleet manufacturer of choice”. It’s also one of the brands three key pillars: awareness and image; sales performance; customer experience and loyalty.
Nick Andrews, Seat head of fleet and business sales, is developing a fleet aftersales charter which he expects to be ready within three months.

“Certain hygiene factors are essential, such as access to parking, access to an area where drivers can continue with their business and servicing while you wait,” he said.

“We are speaking to leasing companies and fleets to understand their expectations, and to a wide selection of dealers to ensure we can deliver against that.”

The aftersales charter is one of a series of initiatives Seat has embarked upon as it looks to steadily grow its fleet sales over the next three years.

“We are looking for fleet sales of 15,000 in 2010, more than 17,000 in 2011 and 20,000 in 2012 for a 1.1% share of the market,” Andrews said.

Seat has also entered Motability for the first time this year and is looking to take 1% of its business. And it is looking to grow rental volumes to 1.8% market share by 2012.

However, Andrews stresses that Seat will not be relying on rental to grow its fleet sales.

His biggest challenge is to create an image with fleet drivers; currently they simply do not think about the brand when making their car choices. However, Seat research has found that they do not have a negative image of the marquee, which gives it a base from which to build.

“We have to get on more options lists and also raise awareness with the user-chooser drivers,” Andrews said.

The carmaker is tendering for a fleet business centre that will act as a contact centre for leasing companies, fleets and end users, improving communications and enabling them to book services such as demonstrator cars. It hopes to launch the service at the start of next year.