Superior customer engagement is defined by an experience that lets users resolve their issues, address their challenges and achieve their goals easily and efficiently in a way that feels natural.
In the automotive finance sector, better engagement can mean using automation that allows lenders to book more deals and better serve customers in a challenging business environment. It also involves creating a customer support solution that is user-friendly and robust enough to add value to the applicant’s journey, making the financing and purchase of a new vehicle more seamless, secure and simple.
The development of this type of solution requires a customer-centric mindset. Effective services and tools should be designed with the end user in mind, removing as much friction and as many extraneous steps as possible from the origination, underwriting and loan management processes.
Driving better CX
So where does the drive for providing a superior customer experience come from? What facilitates a customer-oriented solution? A primary foundation for designing effective customer-focused solutions is a technology vendor with a dynamic, customer-focused company culture. In fact, it’s nearly impossible to develop the kind of rich experiences that users deserve without maintaining a vibrant, responsive and committed business environment.
The most successful examples of user-friendly software come from organizations that place a high value on the experiences and engagement of their own employees. A motivational company culture creates norms that encourage employees to subscribe to productive values, passions and beliefs, and to incorporate these attributes into their offerings. This creates a collective sense of stewardship for producing positive outcomes.
Modeling positive engagement through shared experiences
This phenomenon of an enriching company culture is unfortunately rare. According to data from research firm Gallup, “just 23 percent of U.S. employees strongly agree that they can apply their organization’s values to their work every day, and only 27 percent strongly agree that they ‘believe in’ their organization’s values.” Yet, internal culture has been known to have a major effect on a company’s ability to control its strategic direction, since it has “a powerful influence on the behavior of all employees.”
Global workplace consultant Culture Partners suggests that “activating” a company culture, or getting those values to permeate the workplace and shape outcomes, requires ongoing action from leadership. Teams need to engage in collective experiences in order to keep them focused on their goals and supporting the company’s mission.
An effective company culture is based on collective experiences that model the type of engagement expected from the team, and is reflected in a number of company initiatives, from the product roadmap, customer service and partner relationships to the actual design of the systems its clients ultimately use.
The creation of impactful customer-centric software does not happen in a vacuum. Sophisticated, user-friendly solutions are built by people who are both inspired and inspirational. They are encouraged by shared objectives, grounded in a common culture. Successful companies pay particular attention to this. Building and maintaining a positive and collectively beneficial culture is a strong foundation for success.
Sam Heath is the Chief Revenue Officer of Inovatec Systems. Inovatec provides LOS, LMS and direct systems that seek to eliminate friction in the lending process and automate much of the manual work of originating and managing loans.
Auto Finance Summit East, Auto Finance News’ new spring event, kicks off May 10-12 at the JW Marriot Nashville. To learn more about the 2023 spring event and register, visit autofinance.live/afs-east.