Opportunities of Aftersales Services in Iran’s automotive industry

Author: Nader Vahhab Aghaei, Senior Expert of Automotive Industry (nader.aghaei@outlook.com)

Almost 50 years have passed since the establishment of Iran National Company. This organization, by transferring the automobile assembly technology of Talbot factory, began assembling the first Paykan automobile in Iran. Its boldness, consequently, paved the way for other organizations to turn toward assembling other automobiles such as Citroen Dyane, Renault 5, Pride, Shahin and Aria. Organizational maturity and sophistication is the least expectation from 40 years of industry and once more Iran Khodro Co. (former Iran National) showed courage and stopped its 40-year old production of Paykan to examine its own automotive capability by designing national automobiles. And if world economic limitations were not imposed upon Iran, maybe today it would unpretentiously be on the way of automotive contenders.

 Nowadays, advances in worldwide communications, the presence of reputable international companies in Iran’s market, and other influential factors have led to a change in the taste, needs, and expectations of people from Iran’s automotive industry. Now Iranians are aware of the fact that the competition among car-manufacturing companies is so tight that they can express their opinions and seek their rights. They came to the realization that the winner of this tight competitive market is no one but the customers and if these car-manufacturing companies fail to care about customers’ needs, then they are able to bring these companies to their knees, and that is how society has its effect on the industry.

 After-sale services in Iran were one of the few domains in automobile industry which did not advance synchronously with the growth of industry. But the (previously) mentioned changes in society caused this domain to be able to reconstruct its activity and even claim that recently the amount of knowledge applied to this domain has surpassed its precedent industry that can be listed as follows by general categories:

 1- The importance of after-sale services for the ministry and the existence of multiple supervisory organizations that have the executive process of organizations under consideration and control on behalf of the customer.

2- Conducting advanced guidelines in order to supply the customers’ interests in the entire automotive industry.

3- The entrance of standards institute for standardizing executive processes

4- The existence of more than 2,500 specialized delegations offering services to automotive companies, many of which are aware of the latest automobile technologies.

5- Changing the attitude of offering services in a garage to offering services at a clinic (by the admirable efforts of the late Dr. Mojtaba Kashani)

6- Changing the concept of after-sale services from merely referring to services and preservation to a concept of marketing.

7- Applying creative and innovative designs in order to provide customers with user-experienced services.

Despite all the mentioned proceedings and the measures taken, the after-sale services in Iran’s industry is not the same as it is observed in developed countries and this has no reason except that the amount of competition in this domain has been extremely low and policy in this domain is made by the government instead of the organizations. Now that the market is getting ready for the entrance of international companies, it might be deemed necessary that the government also give up on meddling in policy making and grant this possibility to the organizations until in the shadow of competing with each other we’ll see different services offered to the customers.