Winning the Aftersales Battle: How OEMs Can Compete with IAM Providers Through Digital Innovation
Independent aftermarket providers are winning customer attention in aftersales for simple reasons: they often feel easier to use. They make pricing more visible, booking more convenient, parts and service options easier to compare, and the overall experience less fragmented. For automotive OEMs, that creates a serious commercial risk. Aftersales is a high-margin business and an increasingly important growth engine as new vehicle sales plateau, customers keep vehicles longer, and the automotive aftermarket continues to expand. The brands that fail to modernize post-purchase experiences risk losing not only service revenue, but also loyalty, advocacy and future customer lifetime value.
The opportunity is still firmly in OEMs’ favor—if they act. OEMs already possess powerful advantages: direct knowledge of the vehicle, access to connected car data, brand trust, dealer networks, maintenance history, warranty relationships and a growing portfolio of digital services. The challenge is not whether OEMs have the ingredients to compete. It is whether they can turn those assets into a seamless ownership experience that feels more relevant, proactive and convenient than the fragmented alternatives customers find elsewhere.
Why customers defect to IAM providers
Most customer defection in aftersales does not begin with a dramatic brand failure. It happens through everyday friction. A service need appears, but the booking process is clumsy. A maintenance reminder arrives, but it is generic and poorly timed. A customer cannot easily see what is included, compare options or understand cost. Parts, accessories and digital offerings sit across disconnected platforms. Dealers, apps, websites and in-vehicle touchpoints do not reflect the same customer history. In that gap, IAM providers win by offering a cleaner digital experience.
They are setting expectations around transparency, speed and ease. Customers increasingly expect digital-first service journeys with proactive reminders, simple appointment scheduling, service visibility and offers that reflect their actual needs. When OEMs still operate with siloed data, disconnected dealer networks and underused digital services, aftersales can feel reactive and inconsistent rather than intelligent and helpful.
The OEM response: compete on convenience, relevance and trust
To win back share, OEMs need to move beyond transactional service interactions and redesign aftersales as a connected lifecycle journey. That means making service, maintenance, accessories and digital offerings feel unified from the customer’s perspective. It also means using data to remove friction before the customer feels it.
A stronger OEM aftersales model starts with a unified customer and vehicle profile. By bringing together data from connected vehicles, apps, service centers, dealers and digital channels, OEMs can create a 360-degree view of the owner. This foundation makes personalization possible: proactive service reminders tied to real usage, maintenance history that travels across channels, relevant accessories offers based on ownership stage, and communications that reflect actual preferences rather than broad segmentation.
From there, OEMs can activate more intelligent engagement. Predictive maintenance and proactive support help shift service from reactive to anticipatory. Instead of waiting for a breakdown or relying only on static intervals, OEMs can use connected vehicle signals and AI to identify likely service needs earlier, trigger timely outreach and make scheduling easier to complete. The result is a better customer experience and a stronger chance of retaining service revenue inside the OEM ecosystem.
Where digital innovation creates competitive advantage
OEMs do not need to imitate IAM providers feature for feature. They need to deliver a better ownership proposition—one built on convenience, continuity and confidence.
- Unified profiles: Connect customer, household, vehicle, maintenance and repair history into one usable view.
- Proactive reminders: Trigger timely maintenance prompts, service alerts and follow-up communications based on real signals, not generic schedules alone.
- Connected commerce: Make it easy to discover, compare, purchase and schedule maintenance packages, accessories, subscriptions and digital services in one experience.
- Personalized offers: Recommend parts, accessories, upgrades and service packages that match vehicle condition, behavior, seasonality and lifecycle stage.
- Digital ownership services: Bring together service records, digital manuals, warranty information, OTA updates and related products in a single intuitive environment.
- OEM-dealer coordination: Equip dealers with the same visibility and orchestration tools so the brand experience remains consistent across web, app, in-dealer and in-car touchpoints.
This is how aftersales becomes more than a service transaction. It becomes an always-on relationship that keeps the owner connected to the brand long after the sale.
Why dealer enablement matters
Dealer networks remain a critical part of the ownership experience, especially as vehicles become more connected, software-driven and complex to service. But dealer importance does not reduce the need for digital transformation—it increases it. If OEMs want customers to experience one coherent brand relationship, dealers need better tools, better data visibility and better coordination.
When dealers can access relevant customer and vehicle context, they can deliver more useful service interactions, improve scheduling and planning, surface the right offers and reinforce trust at key ownership moments. Better OEM-dealer coordination also reduces the handoff failures that often push customers toward independent alternatives. Instead of fragmented follow-up, owners get one continuous conversation across digital and physical channels.
Building a more defensible aftersales ecosystem
The long-term opportunity for OEMs extends beyond maintenance alone. Aftersales increasingly includes digital education, connected services, EV charging support, subscriptions, in-vehicle commerce and value-added ecosystem partnerships. As vehicles become more software-enabled and customer expectations continue to rise, the winning OEMs will be those that make ownership feel orchestrated rather than improvised.
That requires a platform approach. Data unification, omnichannel orchestration, AI-driven decisioning and scalable operating models are what allow brands to move from disconnected service offers to seamless ownership journeys. Privacy, transparency and governance also matter: as OEMs activate more customer and vehicle data, trust becomes a competitive differentiator in its own right.
How Publicis Sapient helps OEMs redesign aftersales for growth
Publicis Sapient helps automotive brands transform aftersales from a fragmented support function into a connected growth engine. Through Seamless Ownership and Lifecycle Optimization (SOLO), we help OEMs connect customers, vehicles and dealers in a unified ecosystem designed to strengthen loyalty, increase service utilization and maximize customer lifetime value.
SOLO supports a broad set of ownership capabilities, including customer and vehicle profiles, household management, messaging and reminders, maintenance services, telematics, repair and diagnosis history, maintenance prognosis, personalized products and services, service comparison tools, education and learning, chatbots and virtual assistants, digital manuals, checkout and appointment experiences, and subscription-based offerings. The goal is to help customers move easily from awareness to consideration, purchase, service completion and retention—while giving OEMs and dealers the tools to recruit, plan, sell and service more effectively.
Publicis Sapient brings the strategy, product thinking, experience design, engineering and data and AI capabilities needed to make this real. We help clients define the vision, validate business impact, design and build the platform foundation, shape the end-to-end owner journey and turn connected data into real-time insight and activation. That combination is what enables OEMs to compete more effectively with IAM players—not by adding isolated digital features, but by redesigning ownership around the customer.
The next competitive battleground is aftersales
The brands that win in aftersales will be the ones that make service and ownership easier, more relevant and more trustworthy than the alternatives. IAM providers have shown what customers now expect. OEMs have the data, relationships and ecosystem reach to exceed those expectations—but only if they connect them into one seamless experience.
For leaders focused on protecting aftersales margin and growing lifetime value, the imperative is clear: stop treating post-purchase as a series of disconnected events. Start building a digital ownership journey that keeps customers engaged, supported and ready to return. That is how OEMs defend share, unlock new revenue and turn aftersales into a lasting competitive advantage.