Kia launches fleet charter for business customers

Kia has launched a fleet charter to standardise the level of aftersales services its business customers receive.

John Hargreaves, head of fleet and remarketing, told Fleet News about the initiative at Company Car in Action, where the manufacturer exhibited its growing range of models, ranging from its Picanto city car to its new Sorento SUV.

Fleet News: What are your expectations for the rest of 2015?

John Hargreaves: We don’t really target market share as we look more at an absolute number, but our current fleet market share is slightly ahead of last year at 2.85%.

We are on target to do our number this year, but we are not doing it by forcing cars into rental or Motability, we are looking at natural growth, probably corporate business, for any gains we make.

Our rental sales are stable and capped at a maximum of 10% of our total volume so we won’t exceed that.

Pretty all of the rental we do, probably three-quarters of it, comes back to us as buy-back and we sell it as approved used cars.

FN: Are you introducing, or have you recently introduced, any new initiatives for fleets?

JH: We know there’s more to fleet than simply providing the right cars at the right prices and something we have done is look at our aftersales proposition for fleet customers.

We’ve always been strong in aftersales, but without having an official fleet package and treating fleet customers differently to retail customers in any way.

This has never caused us any concern and we haven’t had complaints from people, but we decided we wanted to formalise an aftersales package for our fleet customers so have introduced a fleet charter.

Almost all of our dealers have signed up to it and it effectively looks at standardising the level of service a fleet customer can expect when they go into a Kia dealer, whether it is labour rates, while-you-wait servicing, or courtesy cars.

They are not ground-breaking new ideas, but it does mean that a fleet customer is going to get the same service from all our dealers rather than any variations.

FN: What new fleet models have you launched/are you due to launch this year?

JH: We launched the new Sorento earlier this year which is going extremely well in both fleet and retail.

The old car was popular and the new car has built on that. The thing the new car has done is show that there is complete acceptance of the brand in terms of vehicle pricing because the new car is significantly more expensive than the old one was.

These cars are now selling for upwards of £40,000 and whereas before in the fleet arena there might have been an issue with Kias priced at that level, there is acceptability of the brand which means we can sell the car at that sort of price.

We have an upgrade for Ceed coming in the next quarter. There will also be some new Ceed powertrains, on the small engine high power principle, which we will have later this year.

New Sportage and Optima will most likely to be available in the very early part of next year.