Bank of America balances high-tech, high-touch [Spotlight]

Bank of America’s customer experience blueprint hinges on a delicate balance between technology and humans.

“We call it the high-tech and high-touch approach to be able to offer that streamlined digital capability for our clients but then also allow them to have the access to people to help them with some of their complex financial decisions,” Tim Owens, consumer vehicle lending sales executive, told Auto Finance News.

The bank is leveraging technology, such as online channels and portals, to bolster communication between dealers and banking customers.

Owens spoke with AFN about Bank of America’s focus areas heading into 2020 and how the bank will leverage opportunities within its existing customer base, especially with vehicle sales anticipated to slow. What follows is an edited version of Owens’ conversation with AFN.

Auto Finance News: Where are you spending most of your time and resources these days?

Tim Owens: We have about 10,000 preferred dealers that we work with, so we’re always busy making sure we’re staying in tune with the market and that we’re doing everything we can to best serve our preferred dealer network. That takes a lot of time and effort, but equally, it’s our client opportunity.

As you can imagine, at Bank of America, we serve over 50 million households. Those 50 million households have lending needs, and we talk to those clients every day through our roughly 36,000 client-facing professionals.

So the things we’re really focused on are: How are we connected to our clients? How do we serve their needs and provide their car financing? And then, how do we provide that seamless handoff to our dealer network? There’s lots of work being done in that regard.

AFN: How does the process work?

TO: We base our strategy around our clients’ life priorities. As they mature through their life, they have needs for a home loan or an auto loan, or retirement, college for their children, things like that. When auto comes up, we’ve built what we think is a best-in-class, digital auto application. Clients can go in — and if they’re a bank client, it’s authenticated — it’s a few fields, they get their approval, and if they have a relationship with the bank, discounts are passed [along]. So, we give them the rate, we give them the approval, and then it prints out a letter that they can take to one of our preferred dealers.

One of the great things we did with our 10,000 dealers was develop a digital carshopping network. Dealers can post their inventory, almost like an AutoTrader type of a site but it’s for Bank of America. We have over 5,000 dealers already signed up, we have almost 2 million cars in inventory. When our clients are shopping for a car, they can visit the digital car-shopping site where they can see what cars are available. They can apply for a loan online, and then we can provide that lead to the dealer and say, ‘Okay, our client has reviewed the inventory, we have preapproved them, and we can send them in with a preapproval for your dealership.’

AFN: What feedback are you hearing from clients, and how are you integrating that into your strategy?

TO: I get feedback from dealers that they’ve embraced it because it allows them to show their inventory on their website — they’re very interested in getting their inventory out there in the marketplace — and we send them a client. The feedback that we’ve gotten is the clients are very engaged when they come in, it’s a great experience for the client and a great experience for the dealer.

This year we’ve seen a lot of momentum with the digital car-shopping network. Since the beginning of the year, we’ve increased the inventory, not quite double but I’d imagine by the end of the year we may have doubled the inventory. We have a little more than half of our dealers on the platform, and it’s growing. The more dealers we put it in front of, the more dealers are raising their hands and saying, ‘Yes, I want to be part of this experience.’

AFN: Aside from optionality, what’s another tech goal for 2020?

TO: I think next year for the industry it’s going to be a challenging year. Most forecasts show the SAAR is going to go down. At Bank of America, we certainly look at the market, but we don’t measure our success or opportunities just by the market.

As I mentioned before, we have 50 million households around the country that do business with us. So for us, the other investment is how do we make it easier for those 36,000 clientfacing professionals to have conversations with their clients, and how do they have those right conversations at the right time. That’s another piece of our investment and our focus as we head into 2020.

With digital capabilities and leveraging client data in the system, as opposed to sitting down and taking a 20-minute application, financial advisors can answer any question the client may have, but also allow the client to leverage their own device that’s prepopulated, authenticated, all streamlined, and do it in less than a minute.

So first it’s about delivering the capabilities, which we have done, and it’s relatively new, but now having the client-facing professionals have that conversation with the client and then introducing them to that digital way of engaging. It’s just leveraging the digital channel to streamline it for our clients.