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Training

Reducing Chargebacks with Good Customer Service

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.

Categories
Training

Training: Ensuring the ROI

Contributing Author: Steve Roennau Vice President Compliance EFG Companies
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.
Categories
Training

A New Approach to Menu Presentations

Dave Gibbs Training Manager EFG Companies
Dave Gibbs
Training Manager
EFG Companies

It’s a common practice in most F&I offices to utilize menus of various types to present F&I products to customers. They can help to maintain compliance and ensure that every customer knows their choices when it comes to protecting their purchase. However, few subjects inspire more debate than how to effectively utilize menus to enhance the customer experience and effectively present F&I products.

While most F&I Managers still use menus to sell F&I products, there is another approach or philosophy that can be even more effective than using them as step-selling tools. I would encourage you to consider the menu as a natural conclusion to a benefits presentation and discussion, tailored to the needs of your customer that have been identified.

I do not recommend only using a menu to present and sell your F&I products. Many of your customers have most likely been through a similar presentation and are conditioned to reject any proposition you may have for them immediately. Most of us have experienced the “No thanks, I will pass” response that comes as soon as you begin to review the menu. The wall goes back up and the customer stops listening to you. Many times, all they can see is the cost of the products and they aren’t even hearing the benefits you may be trying to convey.

A better approach would be to identify the customers’ needs through conversation prior to presenting a menu. Utilizing the information that both you and the sales associate gathered from them, you can then transition to a product discussion and a review that is tailored to their individual and unique needs. This can help the customer see areas where they may have risks during their time of ownership and cultivate a value-based proposition.