Spring is here, and that means it’s time for a whole-business refresh. Let’s start with your consumer finance program. When was the last time you gave this critical part of your business the refresh it deserves? If the answer is ‘never’ or ‘not recently’ then it’s time to spring into action with a look at the best and quickest way to build a superior finance program.
But before you can sweep out the cobwebs and dust off the shelves of your consumer finance program, you need to identify the areas that need the most attention. You can start with the high priorities that will most impact your bottom line. Here’s where to begin.
Customer Experience
Everything starts with your customers. They are the lifeblood of your business, in more ways than one. When your customers are happy, you get more repeat business, more word-of-mouth recommendations, better reviews (which are a proven influence on new business), and, let’s face it, an improved mindset for yourself and your team since you know and can demonstrate using customer feedback that you are doing a good job.
When it comes to the consumer financing process, you want your customers to walk away feeling like your business delivered value and that applying for financing was a good use of their time. Even when they are eventually approved, a slow, tiresome application process can leave customers feeling harried and drained, all but ensuring they will never want to go through that process with your business again.
Examine your customer experience from top to bottom to find any and all bottlenecks. Where do things grind to a halt? Where do those customer smiles turn into frowns? At what point does the interaction cease to be a continual surpassing of expectations and turn into merely a dull routine? The customer experience is not just a process flow and it isn’t just theater – it is more like a delicious meal served in courses, with each plate brought to the table surpassing the last. Make sure your customer experience has no weak courses.
Pitch Perfection
In retail sales, the pitch isn’t half the battle, it’s the war. Your perfect pitch is forever in a state of refinement – or should be – and it changes with your customers’ needs. If your pitch isn’t build around your consumer finance options and merely tacks them on somewhere, you’re going to lose sales. Why?
Consider the following scenario: you walk into a flower shop. Everywhere on the walls, there are posters advertising the best bouquet ever. The perfect bouquet, which everyone loves, which has rave reviews, which wins hearts and makes every special occasion one to remember. Every staff member raves about it to you, tells you how you cannot go wrong with this singular, premium bouquet. And then, near the end of your transaction, they mention, rather offhand and casually, “Oh, we do have another bouquet, by the way. It’s an option. I have a picture of it in the back if you want to see it.”
Centering matters. Make your consumer finance program the attention-grabbing center of your pitch and not the also-ran you grab from the back at the end of the conversation.
One-Team Mentality
It is not enough for a team to be “all on the same side.” There is such a thing as a kind of malign neutrality in business, where everyone performs functions adequately within a team without ever acting as one cohesive unit.
When it comes to consumer finance, you need to ensure your entire team is on the same page and that everyone is doing more than just performing their function; they should be looking for ways to actively improve your consumer finance program and make your business stand out from the competition.
Talk to your team members about your finance program and take their feedback to heart. You may find that it’s time to upgrade your technology, to rework your pitch, to refresh your branding – whatever the case may be, you’ll have feedback you didn’t have yesterday, and that will put you in a position to make positive changes today.
A Comprehensive Solution
FormPiper plays into all three of these sales program pillars, by delivering a complete consumer finance automation solution that is not one-size-fits-all – with managed and self-managed services available, you can pick the FormPiper setup that is best for your business and count on stellar support every step of the way.
Want to see for yourself how FormPiper can help you clear out the old and bring in new sales in the spring season and beyond? Schedule a demo and experience the FormPiper difference today.
