Ford is certainly on a roll towards expanding the after-sales and service network in the country and has inaugurated 30 new multi-city dealerships nationwide in a single day. The company now has a total of 304 facilities operating across 164 cities in the country and is seeing this as an opportunity to offer an enhanced experience to its customers complimenting its products. The newly inaugurated facilities are built to the new Brand@Retail guidelines to deliver a world class and positive experience, especially to first time buyers in tier 2-4 markets.
The new dealerships were opened in Faridabad, Noida, Jammu, Sri Ganganagar and Jhansi in the Northern region; Shillong and Dimapur in the East; Hosur, Kochi in the South; and Sanand, Raipur, Nashik, Chandrapur and Panvel in the Western region. Recently top executives at Ford had acknowledged that the urban Indian market had stagnated and in order to keep the growth momentum rising, the rural and semi-rural areas will have to be penetrated, while changing the perception of Ford products are expensive to own.
Ford’s invasion into the semi-urban and rural areas is in-line with the company’s plans of expanding to newer markets, where the brand is relatively less known. The company is focusing all of its attention to bringing down the cost of ownership of its products which are easy to own and maintain. The newly inaugurated facilities comprise of sales, service, extended sales and service outlets along with Quick Lane facilities. Ford also introduced the provision of using child parts which allows replacement of a single component only instead of the entire assembly, thus bringing down repair bills substantially.
Ford also opened up two new Quick lane services in Nashik and Kochi to reduce the waiting period taken to service your car. The Quick Lane service features extended operating hours on workdays and Saturdays to provide a faster turnaround time for the customer. Ford’s newly launched one of a kind ‘Happy Pocket Service’ initiative will also be available at all the new facilities and offers transparent and competitive fixed pricing on scheduled service costs starting at Rs. 2199/-.
Ford will also offer its other services such as pan-India Roadside Assistance, 90 minute-Quick Service Bays, Mobile Service Vans, Vehicle report card and Quick Lane at the new facilities. Ford is currently concentrating on expanding its base in the country by launching compact models that adhere to the consumer’s needs of a complete package at lower running costs. The next major launches from the company will be the new Figo and Figo sedan in the highly competitive hatchback and compact sedan segments.
Although Ford is working very hard on reducing the cost of ownership on its new cars, the company’s old vehicles like the Classic and Endeavour don’t boast of the cheapest parts and that’s largely because they weren’t developed with the child parts strategy in mind.
