Measuring customer retention.

Northridge Finance is the motor finance division of Bank of Ireland UK. It lends through dealer and broker partners.

In 2025 Northridge and ddx agreed a customer loyalty and retention strategy. It rests on four pillars (communication and marketing; systems, reporting and data; culture and training; products and services)

The second phase of the work, through 2026, had three parts: support to put the strategy and its action plan in place, with a monthly meeting and a quarterly management update; setting up the retention measure and automating its reporting, at dealer, broker and product level; and training for internal teams and the field force.

In February 2026, at workshops in Belfast, ddx and Northridge worked through the detail: which customers might be excluded, such as those in arrears or opted out; how to match a customer across contracts until Northridge has a single customer ID; and the hierarchy from national figure to region, territory, dealer group and dealer. The reporting cuts include new-to-new, new-to-used, used-to-new and used-to-used, agreement type and length, and a “lost to dealer” view of customers Northridge kept through a different dealer.

ddx has built the reporting tool to that design: the headline measure and its trend, region and dealer-group views, dealer retention and a data explorer for free-form filtering. Finishing it and deploying it onto Northridge’s own systems follows the bank’s IT vendor onboarding.

Training began with two discovery workshops in April to plan it. In July, ddx ran sessions with the internal sales team and with Northridge’s territory managers, the field team who look after dealers.

ddx ran a monthly meeting with Northridge’s retention lead and a quarterly update with the management team throughout the year.

All six territory managers who took part returned feedback. On a scale of one to ten they rated the session 9.0 for relevance to their role, 9.7 for understanding of the programme, and 9.3 for confidence to apply it the following week.

The sessions also fed the action list. The roadmap for 2027 covers the reporting tool’s launch, an equity tool, reporting for the internal sales team, target setting with dealers, and dealer training pilots.