If your bays have gone quiet this year, check the calendar before you check the competition.
A survey commissioned by Youi and run by Dynata across 2,061 Australian drivers, fielded in April 2026, found 47 per cent had delayed at least one maintenance task in 2026, up from 35 per cent in 2024. Six-monthly servicing fell from 46 per cent to 32 per cent over the same period. Sixty per cent of the drivers who put a service off named cost as the reason.
The pattern is sharpest among younger owners: 79 per cent of Gen Z drivers and 76 per cent of Millennials delayed maintenance in that survey, against 62 per cent of Gen X and 37 per cent of Baby Boomers. If your regulars have gone quiet and they are under 45, this is very likely why.
Your customer has not gone to a competitor. They are still on your books, and they have decided this quarter is not the quarter for a service.
The upside is the customer never left. Their name, their car, their last service date, all of it is already sitting in your booking system. Getting them back takes a list and a text, not a Facebook page, a boosted post or a dollar of ad spend.
Building the list
Pull every customer who is overdue against their own service interval, not a generic six-month rule: their actual last-visit date plus whatever you booked them in for next. Sort into three buckets:
- One to three months overdue: a light nudge, they may just be busy.
- Three to six months overdue: a direct message naming the car and the job.
- Six months or more: treat as a win-back, not a reminder.
The message that gets a reply names the vehicle and the job, not the workshop. "Your Hilux is due for its 40,000km service" gets read. "We miss you, book now" gets deleted with the rest of the noise in that inbox. Keep the first text short: name, rego or make and model, the service that's due, and one number to reply to. Nothing else.
Text first, call second. A message costs nothing and can be sent in the ute at lunchtime. If there is no reply within 48 hours, that is when a phone call earns its time.
What the AAAA's own research adds
The association's 2026 research into workshop loyalty found the follow-up costs more customers than the mechanical work does. Three habits close that gap: a clear explanation at handover, a proactive update while the car is on the hoist for anything bigger than a logbook service, and a check-in call 48 hours after the customer drives out.
Run that 48-hour call as a habit, not a one-off, and the next recall list is shorter, because fewer customers drift into the overdue bucket in the first place.
Monday morning
Before anything else, pull the last 12 months of service history, sort every customer more than one month past their own due date into the three buckets above, and send the first batch of texts to the one-to-three-month group before lunch. That is a morning's work on a system you already own.