PLANO, Texas — Toyota Financial Services is in the midst of transforming from a traditional financial services company to a digital-native organization, Kim Cockrell, vice president of service operations, told Auto Finance News. “We have been around for quite some time and manual processes still abound, so we’re really pushing a quest to take an outside-in approach,” she said. “What that means is defining our processes on how the customer experiences us, as opposed to [defining our processes] on something that is easy for us to do internally.”
With that lens, TFS is redesigning its onboarding and registration processes. The revamp, which is slated to be complete by year end, will take what is currently a 15-step process and cut it down to a five-step process. “You become a new customer of TFS, so you’re excited to get your car; you’ve had a great experience at the dealership, now you have this new contract and you don’t know us,” Cockrell explained. “So we need to welcome you, we need to onboard you and we need to give you the lay of the land of what to expect in your relationship with TFS,” she added, noting that customer feedback has shown those areas “have a lot of room for improvement.”
The first phase, completed in April, involved a navigation redesign. The captive rebranded its website and mobile app so that the payment process was built around what a customer’s payment journey looks like. “We’re pushing forward the areas that [a customer] would hit first when they go to make a payment. We’re also redesigning that so it flows more intuitively based on what we know [a customer’s] behavior is like,” Cockrell said. “We’re serving those things up to you rather than [a customer] having to navigate to find them.”
The goal, Cockrell added, is to boost the number of interactions on the lender’s mobile app that are self-service rather than customer service agent-assisted. “When you think of Uber or Amazon, you don’t ever really think about calling them. Everything you need is in the palm of your hand, so we’re trying to design all of those initial experiences with that mindset,” she said.
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