Auto lenders have only one chance to make a good first impression online, and that’s especially true among millennials, who now make up 35% of the car-buying population, according to LendingTree data. However, Auto Finance News found decidedly mixed results in a “mystery shopping” experiment.
A few months back, AFN wanted to see how some of the biggest auto lenders responded to a simple email request from a reporter posing as a shopper: “I’m interested in buying a car. How would I go about getting a loan?” AFN scored the responses based on a range of criteria, including speed of response, the number of online communication tools available, interactivity, accessibility, personalized responses over email and Twitter, ability to apply online, and user-friendliness. Total scores were tallied into letter grades. The concept is unchanged from a feature AFN has run for several years, with the addition of a score for Twitter responses and for live chat — features that are common today, but were scarce or unavailable a few years ago.
The lenders researched were the Top 20 by volume, according to the 2015 Big Wheels Auto Finance ranking, based on 2014 data.
When shopping for a car loan, consumers seek a wide range of information at their fingertips, in an instant. This year, AFN put a special emphasis on speed and personalized communication, based on the premise that it should be quick and easy for customers to glean the information necessary to secure a loan online. The results this year varied drastically from previous years. Nissan Motor Acceptance Corp. topped the “A” list, with a considerable leap from prior years. Bank of America Dealer Financial Services (BofA) and Citizens Automobile Finance Inc. followed Nissan. Both went out of their way to make sure our shopper had all the information needed.
Three other captives — Toyota Financial Services, BMW Financial Services and Mercedes-Benz Financial Services USA (MBFS) — also made the highest-scoring group, even though they had to finesse whether to address questions themselves or direct questions to their dealer channels.
Three lenders — American Honda Finance Corp., BB&T Dealer Financial Services and Chase Auto Finance — left our mystery shopper no wiser than she was before the initial contact. The No. 1-ranked lender from our previous experiment in 2012, Ford Motor Credit, lost points for the lack of variety in communication tools — such as live chat or Twitter — which many other companies have successfully adopted.
Click through our sections below to see the final tally of the nation’s top 20 auto lenders, based on customer service.