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EFG Companies Scores a Clean Sweep with Four Stevie® Awards

Post author By efgmarketing
Post date February 27, 2018

Ongoing National Recognition of EFG’s Standard of Excellence

EFG Companies, the innovator behind the award-winning Hyundai Assurance program, announced today that the company was recognized in all four categories submitted at the 12th Annual Stevie^® Awards for Sales and Customer Service, a feature of the American Business Awards^SM, the USA’s top business awards program. This marks the fourth year running that EFG has brought home Stevie Awards. This year, the company received the following:

A Silver Award for Call Center of the Year (up to 100 seats)
A Silver Award for Innovation in Customer Service
A Silver Award for Sales Management Team of the Year
A Bronze Award for Sales or Customer Service Solutions Technology Partner of the Year

For more information on EFG’s accomplishments and the history behind the Stevie Awards, visit http://bit.ly/EFGStevies

Tags American Business Awards, ASE Blue Seal of Excellence, Association of Finance and Insurance Professionals, AutoRemarketing Power 300, Benchmark Portal, Dealer of the Year, F&i and Showroom Magazine, Nifty 50, Powersports Business, SSAE-16, Stevie Awards

Dealership Marketing Dealership Training

The Integrated Dealership

Post author By efgmarketing
Post date February 14, 2018

Contributing Author:
John Stephens
Executive Vice President
EFG Companies

One of the biggest struggles many dealerships have is breaking the different departments out of their silos to work together towards dealership initiatives. Sales teams tend to focus on just increasing front-end margin. On the other side, F&I teams tend to focus on back-end margin, financing, and product sales. The service drive considers itself completely separate from sales and finance, working towards completely different goals.

While the individual goals of each department are important, if they aren’t aligned under a general strategy for the dealership, they can often create tension and even serve as a deterrent to achieving larger dealership initiatives. While this may seem odd, just go with me here. To keep everyone aligned, go back to the basics of marketing: Product, Place, Price and Promotion.

Product and Place

Does your inventory mix meet the needs of your target consumer demographic? To determine this, take a look at your sales numbers for 2017 and look at what type of vehicles were the biggest sellers, i.e. sedans, SUVs, Trucks, etc. Talk with your service department to get a better understanding of what type of vehicles are coming through the service drive and the costs associated with certain repairs. The service department can demonstrate where attention is needed relative to new technology and cost of repair as well as the costs of certain repairs for certain models.

For example, if you sell a large amount of diesel vehicles, your service department can provide you an overview of just how much more maintenance this vehicle requires, and the associated cost of that maintenance. This knowledge can then be applied in sales and F&I to better promote the benefits of a pre-paid maintenance plan for diesel vehicles.

Featured

EFG Companies Cautions Retail Automotive Dealers, Lenders and Partners to Maximize Data Security Measures

Post author By efgmarketing
Post date February 12, 2018

Rise in Digital Auto Sales and F&I Increases Security Risk Twofold

EFG Companies, the innovator behind the award-winning Hyundai Assurance program, today highlighted data security as one of the largest areas of concern in 2018 for retail automotive dealers, lenders and their partners. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center and CyberScout, 1,579 data breaches occurred in 2017, representing a 44.7 percent increase year-over-year.

Seeing this trend on the horizon, EFG achieved SSAE-16 certification in 2016, and has an ongoing digital security plan that enables it to implement enhanced safeguards ahead of need. EFG annually invests approximately a quarter of a million dollars on data security enhancements. For more information, visit http://bit.ly/2nUSYzw.

While retail automotive has been regulated under the Safeguards Rule of the 1999 Gramm-Leach Bliley Act, digital data was not considered an important area of focus until recent years.

This risk is driven in part by the rise of digital technology in the automotive market. From wirelessly connected cars to digital customer relationship management systems (CMS), data access points have increased exponentially. A recent Frost & Sullivan report indicated that IT spending in the connected automotive market is projected to increase 17.3 percent between 2015 to 2025. However, the industry is just beginning to address how to protect private consumer information in a digital environment.

In the physical realm, it takes less than one minute and three pieces of information for a motivated thief to execute a security breach at a retail automotive dealership. In the digital realm, a computer hacker can gain access to payment processing software in seconds, grabbing data and exiting before the dealership is aware of the breach. According to a 2017 study commissioned by IBM, the average cost of a single stolen data record is $141. The average total cost of a security breach was $3.62 million. The average probability of a company suffering a security breach within the next two years is 27.7 percent.