Ally’s Dealer Education Initiative Turns One

It has been a year since Ally Financial, Inc. announced the opening of its Performance Development Center, an interactive training center with a focus on dealership processes and profitability, according to a company press release.

“We moved into the Performance Development Center, the e-learning space, really in earnest, a year ago today, and loaded up all our contents specifically for dealers to access,” Jim Whiteford, executive dealer performance development, said. “Since we launched the development center, we have about 7,300 learners that have access to and gone in to the center, and have either taken a course or registered for a roundtable, or something in-dealership. “

In that time Ally has also been able to refine the center and its curriculum based on dealer feedback, according to Whiteford.

“The ability for dealers to do a search specifically around certain content, or a general manager to do a search for F&I content or curriculum was one thing that really came back from dealers specifically,” Whiteford said. “We’re getting feedback that dealer salespeople, and people at the dealership in general, need shorter, more succinct, learning modules. 15 minutes max; allow them to get in and get out quickly, allow them to do some things when maybe there’s not a customer in front of them.  So we are continuing to refine our content based on the learner’s needs and making things short, sweet, and very easily digestible.”

Much of the curriculum is focused specifically on Ally, Whiteford said, but there are courses offered that have a more general focus.

“Our ECOA, which is the Equal Credit Opportunity Act piece, which is one module on the Performance Development Center, is not specific to Ally. It’s specific to the law and the things that you should know about the act,” Whiteford said.  “We are not lawyers, we are very direct in making sure that when we sit down with dealers at a roundtable, or in dealership, that they should be counseling with their own legal team on any of the issues that they face internally.  But we do point out certain areas of the law that they should be aware of.”

The goal of the center may be education, but could hopefully serve to strengthen the relationship between Ally and the dealers enrolled in its courses, according to Whiteford. Ally paid out $92 million in December 2013  to settle charges from the CFPB that its dealer network was discriminating against certain customer groups.

“Our training is obviously designed to create an edge for us as a company and provide dealers with a level of education and services that provide, I’ll call, performance enhancing tools that support their business, whether it’s Ally-specific or dealer-specific,” Whiteford said. “We will use that as an opportunity to maybe grow a relationship that we may not have today, but we will not use anything as a hard sell.  Everything we have internally is used really just to provide a benefit to the dealer, and helping us create a relationship with that dealer, in hopes that the relationship can broaden into other parts of the business.”