Antonio Fabrizio looks into how motor
finance captives can maximise the opportunities available to them
on the internet
A captive’s website strategy is mainly
focused on visibility, so that customers can easily find
information about financing before they actually walk into a
dealership to purchase their new car. However, innovative
approaches, allowing more operations than product research, are
also being developed – or at least envisaged.
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Such innovations include the possibility of getting
quotes online, gaining credit approval in advance of entering a
dealership, and allowing existing customers to handle their
accounts online without having to contact a call centre.
BMW Financial Services (BMW FS) is at an advanced
state of such development, and launched a new website on 15
February, at www.bmwfinancial
services.co.uk.
Joe Pattinson, marketing general manager at BMW FS,
says that a major innovation of the updated website is a ‘product
selector’, which “provides the customer with the best finance
solution based on their circumstances”. Another element of BMW FS’
web strategy is a pilot scheme for used cars.
Pattinson says: “We are currently running a pilot
with a number of dealers where customers can view quotes on used
vehicles and find a payment that suits them by adjusting term,
mileage and deposit, to see what the car would cost them on a PCP
[personal contract purchase] or HP [hire purchase] agreement.”
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By GlobalDataThe BMW used car finance calculator provides
instant quotes, and because it is proving popular, Pattinson says
that the captive is planning to roll it out to the rest of the
dealer network in the next weeks.
The BMW FS website also allows requesting a quote
for a new BMW car – with a response usually provided within 24
hours.
Another captive, RCI Financial Services (RCI),
which finances both Renault and Nissan cars in Europe, is also
planning a number of actions that will improve its website
performance.
RCI’s MD Steve Gowler says that very high in his
agenda is a plan to provide customers with quotation modelling.
Currently, neither Renault nor Nissan offers this
service, but it is being developed at Nissan and should be made
available to customers in the not-too-distant future.
Gowler hopes to do something similar with Renault
too.
“All you see now are the static quotes, but we
would like customers to able to select the cars they are interested
in, and start to work out their own financial quotations,” he
says.
Both captives are also at various stages of
providing existing customers with additional ways to use the
website.
The new BMW website, for example, will enable
existing customers to carry out various transactions online without
having to contact a call centre. These will include updating their
address, changing their bank details, downloading direct debit
forms, changing payment dates and so on.
Gowler says he would like to do something similar
with RCI in the future.
“The next step in our website development should be
ensuring that existing customers are able to get a settlement
figure on their loans, or to inform us of changes of circumstances
online, rather than phoning us,” he says.
Tying up with the OEM
In the case of RCI, however, the
manufacturers’ websites and not the captive website are the main
factor of visibility because few customers would associate the RCI
name with Renault or Nissan.
“Our strategy has been to be very prominent on the
manufacturers’ websites,” Gowler explains. “Rather than developing
our own independent web strategy, the focus is in the web
development of the manufacturers.”
Gowler highlights that both Renault and Nissan are
investing a lot of money in making sure that their cars have high
visibility in an internet search.
A lot of the manufacturers’ efforts, he adds, are
specifically directed to ensuring that the range of finance offers
available with specific cars always appear together with those
cars.
“I think the whole issue is about promoting the
offers and giving the customers an opportunity to look around at
what is available. With Renault you can theoretically buy a car
over the internet, but hardly anybody does it – volumes are
absolutely tiny in that respect.”
He adds: “Rather than walking into a dealership
absolutely cold, people use the internet to narrow down the
shopping list.
“If you are a customer who is not particularly hung
up on brands, but one of your top criteria is zero percent finance,
then you can find easily which manufacturers are offering zero
percent finance at that moment, and narrow your shopping list down
to them.”
Renault, for example, is very focused on PCP as a
product, and uses the internet quite well strategically in making
sure that offers are visible, he says.
Pattinson agrees that visibility is the top
priority. He says that BMW FS’s key objective when designing the
new website was to provide both existing and potential customers
with a site that would be easy to navigate and able to give clear,
concise information.
With the web becoming more and more important as a
sales channel and a way to generate leads, the fact that captive
financiers can ‘hitch a ride’ on their manufacturer parents’
websites – thus boosting visibility – gives them a strong basis for
success in the online world.
