Author: efgmarketing

Reducing Chargebacks with Good Customer Service

Post author By efgmarketing
Post date May 1, 2019

Contributing Author:
Joe Williams
Account Executive
EFG Companies

We’ve all experienced the repercussions of chargebacks. A customer refinances their auto loan and the dealership loses the rate markup. A customer cancels their products and the dealership loses the profits from those. Often, the negative effects roll downhill all the way to the F&I manager’s paycheck.

The goal, of course, is to minimize chargebacks. But, how can your F&I managers go about it? First, it’s important to understand what causes customers to refinance and/or cancel their consumer protection products. So, let’s start by putting ourselves in the customer’s shoes. Right or wrong, the F&I office is sometimes seen as a high-pressure environment. The in-depth discussions about their financial situations might make some customers disengage. If a customer leaves the finance office more disengaged, and feeling like they were pressured into a deal, you might have a refinance and cancellation on your hands.

The challenge for your F&I managers is to keep customers invested in the conversation and tone down the high-pressure atmosphere of the office. How? Simply go back to the basics of providing good customer service.

Tags chargebacks, dealership training, refinance

Uncategorized

Don’t Skip the Warranty Review

Post author By efgmarketing
Post date April 11, 2019

Contributing Author:
Eric Fifield
Chief Revenue Officer
EFG Companies

Here’s the scenario. It’s a busy Saturday. Every F&I manager is working a deal, and there are still two customers waiting to start the finance process. What’s an F&I manager to do? You don’t want to lose customers due to a long wait, but you also want to make the most on each deal. In an effort to speed up the F&I process, it’s all too common for F&I managers to rush certain aspects, like the manufacturer’s warranty review.

However, this could lead to several pitfalls for your dealership, making the F&I process longer and leaving you open to noncompliance. Under the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act, all dealers are required to provide detailed information about warranty coverage before a customer purchases a vehicle for personal, family or household use. This helps ensure that customers know what to expect in the event something goes wrong, and it enables them to compare coverage on vehicles.

So, if a vehicle comes with a manufacturer’s warranty, or complimentary coverage of any kind, your dealership is required to inform customers of the coverage. Additionally, if an F&I manager rushes the warranty review, they miss the opportunity to identify potential consumer needs or concerns that could be filled with consumer protection products. This could lead to a much longer product presentation and negotiation process, lengthening the F&I process as a whole and potentially reducing product penetration and PRU.

The manufacturer’s warranty review is about much more than identifying what the warranty covers. Effective managers use this review to identify areas of necessary coverage and build value in consumer protection products before the product presentation.

For example, if a customer is financing a vehicle for 72 months, but a majority of the manufacturer’s warranty ends after three years, you could use the review to point out that the customer’s investment will not have the same protection for the last three years of their loan.

Training

Training: Ensuring the ROI

Post author By efgmarketing
Post date March 11, 2019

Contributing Author:
Steve Roennau
Vice President
EFG Companies

There’s not a dealer in the automotive industry that doesn’t wrestle with the concept of training! Everyone agrees that training is necessary to run a successful, profitable, efficient and ethical dealership operation. However, the spectrum of dealers’ commitment to training is wide in the retail automotive space. Even the dealer that is committed to training struggles with things like:

Why pay to train someone who’s just going to leave?
It’s difficult taking income-producing team members off the floor, desk, or drive for an extended period of time.
I can’t determine if training is actually making a difference to my bottom line.

I can’t get my managers to see the value. My dealership runs a certain way and they don’t want to have to re-train team members after a training course that is counter-intuitive to the way we operate.