Who answers the first message? The ownership gap between OEM, importer and dealer

The buyer sees one brand. Behind the first message sit up to three organisations, and in most European networks none of them is measured on the reply.
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Last week in Onlive Radar our CEO wrote that when the buyer stops clicking, the conversation becomes the funnel. When Google shows an AI summary, people click a traditional result in 8% of visits, against 15% without one (Pew Research Center). AI agents will push that further. Fewer buyers will arrive through a form on a page we designed, and more will arrive as a message: on the brand site, on a dealer's WhatsApp, in a call to the showroom, or from their own AI assistant.

That raises a question most European networks have never had to answer cleanly. When the message lands, whose job is the reply?

The buyer sees one brand. Behind that first message sit up to three organisations, each with its own budget for generating demand and its own KPI for what happens next. In most networks, none of them is measured on the first reply.

This piece covers where the gap shows up in the data, why the agency model hasn't closed it, what a few brands are changing in their org charts, and four decisions that settle ownership before the next campaign goes live.

The buyer sees one brand

Onlive's survey of 310 car buyers in Germany shows how scattered the entry points already are. For their most recent test drive, 22% booked through the brand website and 16% through a dealer website. Another 22% booked by phone, and 37% simply walked in. Asked how they would prefer to book, the answers spread even wider: 25% chose a dealer website, 20% the brand website, 19% WhatsApp and 19% a phone call, with live chat and AI assistants making up most of the rest.

None of those buyers thinks about which legal entity owns the channel. They message "the brand" and expect the brand to answer. For most of them, the dealer is the brand.

Now look at how the work is measured. The OEM's digital team reports leads generated and cost per lead. The importer reports leads distributed to the network. The dealer reports cars sold and gross per unit. The contact centre, where one exists, reports calls handled. The minutes between a buyer's first message and a useful answer sit in nobody's dashboard.

So in practice the first message is answered by whoever happens to see it first, or by nobody.

Where the gap shows up: OEM leads go unanswered

The clearest evidence comes from mystery shopping that splits results by lead source. In 2023, Keyloop ran mystery shops across ten markets, eight of them in Europe, including Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal. On average, 55% of enquiries received no response at all. In every market except Norway and Spain, leads passed down from the OEM were more likely to go unanswered than leads the retailer had generated itself. In Italy and Portugal, 80% of OEM leads got no reply.

The figures are from 2023. I haven't seen a European study since that suggests the pattern has changed, and the structure that produced it is still in place in most networks.

I used to read numbers like these as a dealer discipline problem. Looking at how leads actually move, it's closer to an incentive problem. A lead the dealer paid for has an owner and a cost attached. A lead the brand pushed into the dealer's CRM overnight arrives with neither, and it competes for attention with the customer standing in the showroom.

A Spanish marketing strategist described the floor-level version in the comments on an earlier Radar issue. In a mid-sized dealership, the reply falls to the salesperson between visits, and every time the message comes out different. That inconsistency is what the buyer experiences as the brand.

The agency model was supposed to settle ownership

Agency sales were meant to answer the question by contract. Under the model, the manufacturer owns the stock and sets a fixed national price, and the dealer acts as its agent for a fixed commission. The customer relationship, and most of the customer data, moves to the OEM.

Then the rollout stalled. Stellantis suspended its Europe-wide agency rollout in 2025 after dealer pushback over margins, keeping it only in Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Volkswagen moved private EV customers back to the conventional dealer model while keeping agency for fleets. BMW runs MINI on agency in 24 European markets, but the BMW brand itself now starts a phased rollout from mid-2027, and German dealers have reportedly been told not before July 2028.

The wider numbers explain the hesitation. A European Commission study found 58% of surveyed manufacturers still use traditional distribution, against 27% on agency structures, and around 92% of European car sales in 2024 went through authorised dealers.

Even where agency is live, it doesn't make the handoff automatic. MINI's rollout surfaced buying scenarios missing from BMW's systems and self-employed buyers who needed manual workarounds. A contract can assign ownership of the customer. It doesn't assign the person who answers at 11:00 on a Saturday.

So for the rest of this decade, most European dealer groups will run a mix. A multi-brand group in Spain might sell one brand on agency and three under franchise, plus a new Chinese brand on whatever model its importer chose last year. Each contract answers the ownership question differently, and the buyer's WhatsApp message arrives on the same group number either way.

Some brands are moving ownership up the org chart

Earlier this month, Kia France created a customer experience directorate under Nicolas Janin, previously its sales director. It brings CRM, customer experience and satisfaction, customer relations, training and network development under one leader. Janin and the new sales director, Elise Remark, both report to operations director Guillaume de Boudemange, whose role was expanded to coordinate sales performance and customer experience with network development.

Kia France president Marc Hedrich said the change should put satisfaction, loyalty and the quality of the experience "even more at the heart of our strategy" (Journal de l'Automobile, our translation).

The detail I would watch is network development sitting in the same directorate as CRM and customer relations. That is the seam where the first reply usually gets lost. The brand holds the data and the campaigns, the network holds the people, and until now they reported to different directors.

An org chart won't answer a WhatsApp at 11:00 on a Saturday. What it can do is give one director the authority to decide who will. Most networks have nobody with that mandate today.

AI on top of an unowned process scales the gap

In July, McKinsey published its research on rewiring customer experience for the agentic era. The line I keep coming back to is that without redesigning workflows, AI "simply scales what already exists, including inconsistency." Its advice is direct: "Do not layer agents onto fragmented workflows." It calls for explicit decision rights, with frontline teams involved from day one to define escalation thresholds and the handoffs between agents and humans.

Translate that into car retail. Picture an AI agent on the brand website that qualifies a buyer and books a test drive. The questions that decide whether that booking turns into a sale are all ownership questions.

Whose calendar holds the slot? The brand's booking tool, the dealer's DMS, a shared group calendar or a salesperson's phone.

Who confirms it, and in which channel? A confirmation from the brand followed by silence from the dealer is worse than no confirmation at all.

Who calls back when the buyer asks about a trade-in valuation the agent can't give? That call usually needs the dealer, on the dealer's numbers.

Who can see the conversation the next morning? If the transcript stays in the OEM's platform, the salesperson who meets the buyer starts from zero.

If those answers aren't written down, the agent makes the brand faster at handing buyers to nobody.

Four decisions that settle the first reply

None of this needs a new contract model or a reorganisation to start. It needs four decisions, agreed between the brand, the importer and the dealer groups, before the next campaign goes live.

Who answers, by channel and hour. Map brand site, dealer sites, WhatsApp and phone against weekdays, Saturdays, evenings and public holidays. Every cell gets a named team and one fallback. Most networks find several cells that belong to nobody.

What the first reply must do. Set a minimum standard: answer the actual question with stock and price information, and offer a bookable slot at a named dealer. "A colleague will contact you shortly" doesn't count as a reply.

When the handoff happens, and what travels with it. Define the triggers that move a buyer from the agent to a person, such as financing terms, a trade-in, a request for a specific dealer or a complaint, and send the full conversation across so nobody starts from zero. In Spain, from 28 December, a customer who asks for a person on the phone must reach one within three minutes. The charter has to name who that person is.

One number everyone reports. Time from first message to a confirmed appointment, measured the same way by the brand, the importer and the dealer, and split by lead source. If brand leads and dealer leads show different numbers, you have found your gap.

This is how we set up Onlive across multi-brand networks. One agent answers on brand and dealer channels in the buyer's language, qualifies the request and books at the right dealer from that dealer's live calendar. When the buyer wants a person, it hands over to the dealer rep or a brand product expert live on voice or video, and everyone in the network sees the same transcript.

The buyer never asks whose lead they are. They remember who answered.