southeast toyota finance

southeast toyota finance

Enhancing Customer Experience in Southeast Toyota Finance

1. Introduction

Enhancing customer experience is at the heart of digital transformation. But what does it exactly mean? More than ever, customer experience is now equated with digital customer experience. Digital has redefined the way to engage customers and has become as important as the products and services. Technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, predictive analytics, etc. have helped businesses better understand customers. And that forms the basis of digital customer experience. In many organizations, digital customer experience is often thought of as a range of digital interfaces such as mobile, self-service tools, the effectiveness of customer engagement on these interfaces, or even digitizing existing customer journey. Serving digital natives is forcing businesses to complete a digital transformation to continuously improve the customer journey and provide proactive and predictive service.

We live in a world where both businesses and consumers have benefited from enhanced access to information, easier access to products and services, and a number of alternate means to interact. In this world, customers are exposed to benchmarks of excellent service and they expect the same level everywhere. There is also a growing trend towards making customers feel special and offering them an even better experience than they are expecting. By better understanding customers and their needs, and by providing them faster access to appropriate help and information, firms can gain a competitive advantage. However, providing good service is not enough; service needs to be better than the customers’ expectations. Firms that do not work towards setting the benchmarks and then offering better service will ultimately lose market share. In this paper, we will provide our point of view on how Southeast Toyota Finance can enhance customer experience.

2. Streamlining Loan Application Process

First, we reviewed all the current processes and development framework utilized. Upon close inspection, we were able to isolate the main application requirements. Based on this, we identified the Alphabet Soup Projects for software solutions and security best practices for document storage using both Adobe solutions for report and document generations and IBM FileNet for application-related document storage and management. Thirdly, this also entailed the replacement of old or antiquated APIs and to be profiled security access and procedures. Lastly, we utilized a workhorse Business Process Management Automation tool called IBM Business Process Manager as a centerpiece for automating the loan application process.

A lot of employees who meet clients on a day-to-day basis shared how the inefficient and old process of preparing the required files for the processing of each loan application takes most of their precious time. The average duration of doing the slow manual process of loan application approval is at 30 minutes or more. Upon comparison with the new automated process, the time needed to convert, prepare, and send application-related documents was incredibly reduced to an average of 5-10 minutes. It was a remarkable result and, to this date, our employees have never been more satisfied and our clients have never been happier! Many employees and their customers have claimed that the process change was really a game changer. So how was the loan application automated?

3. Implementing Personalized Customer Support

In addition to serving customers’ needs, physical office locations provide an opportunity for customer feedback and ensure our representatives are readily available to assist with complex issues as they arise. Thus, we provide an office location with Japanese-speaking associates to cater to our more culturally attuned customers and to assist them in addressing their financial concerns. This exhibit allows SETF to maintain the high level of service our customers desire in the physical realm. As part of their commitment to their brand promise, they needed to facilitate direct connections with their customers, resulting in making sound financial decisions. They knew that creating a customer-centric organization that effectively interacted with their customers would be a crucial business differentiator.

Southeast Toyota Finance takes pride in delivering critical, personal support. With a team of professional customer service representatives and a location strategy carefully formulated to maximize customer support, SETF provides the experience and thoughtful service that our customers, dealers, co-workers, and stakeholders have come to appreciate and demand. We appreciate and acknowledge the need for a physical location for our front-line customer support.

Enhancing customer experience in Southeast Toyota Finance: Implementing personalized customer support.

4. Emphasizing Transparency and Trust

In 2018, Southeast Toyota Finance formed the overall CX strategy team, updated their contact center to a third-party nearshore solution by the end of 2019, created the new CX department, and now they have developed a direction for customer experience overall. They are also known as the elite world-class consumer contact center, after adding a new channel, supporting inbound email, and massively reducing call volume while maintaining a steady 4.8 CPSR average. A number of Southeast Toyota Finance customer service metrics have risen in the last eight years, while others have risen but still require attention. When customers are well-informed and educated about financial planning, the risk decreases, and companies are better able to build strong customer relationships.

Transparency and Customers’ Trust not just make customers trust enough to choose Southeast Toyota Finance, but also set a positive influence on customer loyalty. To understand customer behavior in practice, it is essential to remember that customers are constantly adjusting their service expectations, based not only on different personal experiences but also on personal knowledge reference derived from former service tastes, interpersonal communication, external advertising, and word-of-mouth referral. Once while reviewing the goals of customer experience, Marc Treadway, TFS’s customer experience manager, and the project team who has just finished their new feature training reached a consensus on customer trust. They built a pain journey map, understanding, and empathized with the customer, and found out the apprehension experienced in the buying process.

Finance is a working core in the automotive industry. Sometimes, the consumer’s confidence might be held back from lacking knowledge or understanding of financial products related to their car purchasing. This section presents some tactics set by Spireon to elevate the service standard and build stronger, more trusting relationships between a finance company like Southeast Toyota Finance and their customers. When the loss happens, the recovery rate is expected to be higher with an informed customer who understands what he or she has agreed to pay. To some extent, knowledge could offer convenience to the customer to make the right choice, since customers who are unable to compare incentives are more likely to suffer financial struggles or bad credit, severely affecting customer loyalty.

5. Leveraging Technology for Efficient Operations

By using high-performance computing, emerging tools, and simplified modeling, AI-driven automation (AI) has the ability to simulate human intelligence in areas such as language translation, visual perception, and decision making. The thrust in AI in recent years presents a key opportunity to accelerate decision-making processes. Moreover, AI techniques can effectively assess the environmental signals generated by the client during the credit application terms. As a result, the time to make the decision can be of an order of magnitude (or more) lower than the actual time. Customizing AI for SETF by incorporating dynamic topography (DTI) in these models is not only advancing the science of AI but also curing and improving the millions of experiences and trust (SETF) as a leading auto lender. From the perspective of administrative innovation, the implementation of AI-designed models will lead the methodologies for large-scale credit with learning as a key search and supporting documents to speed up completion.

SETF embarked on the journey with a baseline model that has been developed as a result of the prior experiences of the dealer and credit team. The model was learning from the current database and feedback via the credit approval interface. Multiple executions of the learning and modeling occurred, and these designs have gone unnoticed at critical challenges in conditions such as the independent variable (credit request), the capacity to generalize learning, and respond adequately to data samples due to the overall efficiency and design. The model ended up being very fast but not very suitable for production. It lacked a more profound understanding of the real inhibiting and performing variables that drive the actual SETF scenario.

The digital transformation model aims to deliver an experience superior to customer expectations. SETF embarked on the journey to transform its credit transformation capability. Earlier, the customer who entered the dealership had a credit decision under 10 minutes in nearly 34% of their experiences. The intention is to improve the customer experience and reduce the time in normal credit situations by delivering credit to the client under ten minutes 80% of the time through automated models.