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

John Hargreaves, head of fleet and remarketing, said the Korean brand’s 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.”

He said there is more to fleet than simply providing the right cars at the right prices and so Kia has looked at its 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.”

Hargreaves told Fleet News the new Kia Sorento, launched earlier this year, is selling well in both fleet and retail, which suggested 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.”

Kia is bringing a revised Ceed in Q3 2015 and a new Sportage SUV and Optima saloon are due at the start of 2016.