Reboot for Jeep in Australia

Jeep will offer fewer model variants and better customer service in the hope of winning a bigger share of Australia’s burgeoning SUV market.

That’s the strategy of new Jeep Australia boss, Kevin Flynn, the British auto industry veteran who presented his future for Jeep Down Under in a series of one-on-one interviews with motoring media late last month.

The press rollout followed Flynn’s presentation to Australian Jeep dealers – a conference attended by international Jeep execs including FCA design chief Ralph Gilles and global head of Jeep, Christian Meunier, who told carsales in December he believes Jeep deserves to sell 50,000 vehicles annually Down Under.

In addition to reiterating FCA’s commitment to building right-hand drive vehicles, Flynn was cautiously optimistic for the future of the brand that spearheads FCA’s operations locally.

“Obviously we shared with them [Jeep dealers] where the product is going… which segments we’re going to be in and what's going to happen over the next few years. And we also focused on what we’re going to do,” Flynn explained.

“I think one of the big things here was sort of really understanding, to a certain extent, how did we get to where we’ve got, but more importantly how do I get from where we are to where we need to be?” he opined.

Flynn’s operational changes include ‘Flying Doctors’ to troubleshoot customer problems and rebuilding Jeep’s roadside and customer assistance centres.

Product changes expected to be laid out in detail in early March will comprise a model re-alignment across the Jeep range, including trimming the number of Compass, Cherokee, Grand Cherokee, Wrangler and Gladiator variants from “something like 37, 39 different variants… down to about 25”.

Jeep has parked the over-priced Renegade sub-compact SUV from its local offering, but will release the new Gladiator pick-up in May, followed by an updated Compass and all-new Grand Cherokee in 2021. Jeep Australia is also considering the new LandCruiser-rivalling Wagoneer and Grand Wagoneer.

Said Flynn: “We need to simplify [the line-up]. There's not a lot wrong with our product and [it] is very successful in other markets, and therefore we needed to check our specifications, put in a few more safety elements and a few things like that -- which we’ve done.

“What we’ve noticed is the entry-level low specification [model sales] ain't going to happen, so why have them? So what we've done is looked at the pattern of what we’ve been selling and now we’ve enriched that.

“So if you look at our product lines we’ve taken sort of Compass, Cherokee, Grand Cherokee and then on the other side we’ve got Wrangler and we’ve got Gladiator.

“So on the SUVs, we now are going to start with the Night Eagle spec and in each of those we’re also going to go up to a new S Limited spec."

Flynn says Jeep has a job to rebuild its relationship with customers.

“We’ve laid ourselves out a sh*tload of KPIs that really affect what's going to happen on the ground. I'll be honest with you, I think 90 per cent of the issue has been the way that we have responded or not responded to owners.

“I think the lessons from the past are about rapid growth and not a lot of plugging in of the infrastructure. And because… I spent a lot of time in that aftersales arena as part of my career, I understand the utter importance of having the infrastructure and the support mechanism in place and being customer-centric,” Flynn explained.

He said Jeep Australia would enlist a team of experts named after the internationally famous Royal Flying Doctor Service, established by John Flynn (no relation, we presume) in 1928. Jeep Flynn’s Flying Doctors won’t have a medical purview but will be tasked with troubleshooting issues at the dealership level.

“Their whole job is as soon as we've got something that is not right, uncomfortable, problematic, dealers can’t get their head around it, whatever it is… That's all – I'm not going to load it with anything else,” Flynn explained.

“We’re putting a lot of focus into quality and we’re putting a lot of focus into actually how within an organisation the various areas interact,” he said.