Toyota Financial Services wants to better integrate existing data about current lessees into digital platforms at the dealership level, in order to drive customer loyalty as offlease volume picks up this year, said Matt Haydon, the company’s group manager of retail transformation. “We have a lot of off-lease [volume], and we have a lot of opportunities with new Toyota and Lexus products coming out this year,” Haydon told AFN. “Digitally, we would like to move a lot of our capabilities forward, so that you, as a customer, don’t start over.”
Industrywide, off-lease volume grew 25% in 2016 compared with the year prior, and Black Book predicts it will increase further in 2017. Consumers research their purchases online before walking into the dealership, so it’s all the more important that TFS has those consumer data points so the conversation doesn’t have to start from scratch, Haydon said. “We need to give sales associates better, faster tools and smarter processes to enable the associate — or whoever is engaging the customer — to know who that customer is, what they want, and pick up from there instead of starting from ‘Hi, my name is …’” he said.
“They just spent six months researching it and have already sent information to the dealer, so we want that connectedness to happen right from the start and a lot of that is built on data.” The digital dealership tool RouteOne has become a big part of that strategy, from financing and e-contracting, to insurance offerings. In the next few years, TFS hopes to bring these same retention techniques to retail finance contracts.
