Closing the gaps in the digital lending experience requires a new way of coaching agents

Auto consumers expect a lot these days: an end-to-end digital experience that is supportive, consultative, and seamless. Most lenders still struggle to provide a good online flow for customers, and this gap between consumer expectation and lender capability has an impact on the bottom line.

The truth is, the fully digital buyer doesn’t exist yet. This could be because of problematic legacy processes and systems as discussed during this year’s Auto Finance Innovation Summit, or the consumer’s own discomfort with big transactions online – or both. Either way, at some point in their experience they’ll need or want direct interaction with a real person.

This makes it essential for agents in both origination and servicing to be prepared to fill in the gaps left by a sub-par digital experience. When teams are not well equipped to provide the personalized, consultative conversations consumers want, lenders lose out on revenue and customer experience suffers.

It may be difficult for lenders to identify whether agents are performing well on the phone. Many top-line metrics mask hidden issues, especially if origination and repayment numbers are up overall. This is where technology partners can be critically important. VoiceOps, a coaching enablement solution that works with auto finance teams to improve agent performance at scale, shares that there are generally trends hidden within the data that signal potential missed revenue or performance problems.

One such signal is the presence of large performance gaps between top and bottom agents. This trend indicates a problem with behavior adherence on the team. In other words, agents are not doing what they should be on calls to achieve success and provide the best customer experience.

 VoiceOps data shows that behavior adherence is a rampant and unrealized issue in the auto finance industry. Managers will generally overestimate agent adherence to key call behaviors by as much as 50%. Therefore, agents are not getting the guidance they need to increase their adherence and improve performance.

Lenders are left with two critical gaps to fill: a lagging digital capability and a problematic agent performance distribution. Auto finance teams can address both gaps by implementing behavior-based coaching with agent teams on the phone.

Here are the elements of behavior-based coaching that lenders need to successfully improve adherence and shrink performance gaps:

• Map call flows to discrete behaviors that managers are confident drive toward primary business goals like repayments or loan applications.
• Track adherence to each behavior by agent and across teams. It’s important to consider eligibility of each behavior within a call as part of the adherence calculation. Technology partners can often help with this.
• Coach consistently on behaviors across many calls per agent. Be sure to provide constructive feedback when an agent misses a behavior, and positive reinforcement when they successfully perform as they should.

When managers track adherence to key behaviors across their team for each agent and then efficiently coach on every moment each behavior should be applied, adherence increases rapidly and conversion rates quickly follow. Most importantly, customers feel they received the supportive, consultative experience they wanted, even if it didn’t occur in a purely digital environment.

To learn more about the benefits of behavior-based coaching and how it helps lenders deliver a more consultative customer experience, download the VoiceOps ebook, “The Benefits of Behavior-Based Coaching: Build Trust and Create a Consultative, Customer-Centric Team.”