Internet site displays
finance contracts nearing full term and settlement requests. Fred
Crawley reports.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Alphera Financial Services
has launched a new system to feed sales opportunities back to
dealers and brokers, setting a new precedent for the support of car
finance sellers by providers of the product.
The Lead Management System
(LMS) is plugged into Alphera’s partner ‘infonet site’. It displays
Alphera finance contracts nine months from reaching full term and
which are flagged with requests for settlement figures.
This gives retailers a solid
lead as to where to direct sales energy to secure repeat custom. In
return, Alphera hopes it will see repeat custom of its own when new
deals are made.
The system was piloted by 15
dealers and brokers for six months, before going live in
October.
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By GlobalDataAs statistics elsewhere in
this magazine show, dealers are facing an unexpectedly sharp
drop-off in new sales, and are looking to make more use of customer
management systems to keep existing customers coming back for more
vehicles – and more finance.
Such systems are rarely
offered by car finance providers, and almost never by independent
companies not allied with a particular manufacturer.
While Alphera draws its funds
from the same pot as parent company BMW Financial Services, it is
anything but a captive funder.
The company finances all
makes of vehicle, and managing director Spencer Halil is determined
for it to act in all respects like an independent finance
company.
As such, the new Alphera LMS
shares no customer data with BMW FS, and has very little shared
heritage with the captive’s own customer management
systems.
Halil said there was “no
precedent for a system with structured lead transfer from an
independent lender”.
A director at one of the
country’s largest point of sale brokers agreed, saying that LMS was
“the right thing” for funders to look at, and brokers had seen
“nothing like it”.
He added that Alphera was in
a good position to offer such a system, since for many bank-owned
providers it would make more sense to use customer details for
groupwide cross-selling than to release them back to
dealers.
In the first quarter of next year, Alphera will provide a
series of roadshows for dealers and brokers, focused on training
them in regulatory compliance and efficiency in handling finance
leads.
