Integrated Approach to Determining Creditworthiness in Auto Sales – by Autotech Outlook
A customer’s journey from being a showroom visitor to a vehicle owner hinges primarily on their experience across different stages of the sales funnel. One way automotive dealers can reinforce positive customer experiences is by preemptively obtaining their credit and identity credentials in a secure and compliant manner to assess their creditworthiness early on. This translates into accelerated loan approvals, enhanced transaction efficiency, and improved sales closures.
Identifying this, 700Credit, a leader in the credit service industry, strategically brings pivotal customer insights, including consumers’ credit scores and identity verification to automotive dealerships in the early stages of the sales process. Its solutions provide dealers access to customer information necessary to make the right funding decisions before initiating transactions, while closely monitoring compliance.
700Credit is the largest provider of credit reports, compliance solutions, soft pull products and identity verification & fraud detection solutions to automotive, RV, marine, and power sports dealers. Its growth is anchored in industry partnerships, with integrations extending to over 200 providers in the automotive space.
“We integrate seamlessly into dealer native systems, expediting sales and compliance processes for smoother, quicker, and more effective operations,” says Ken Hill, Managing Director of 700Credit.
Defying the Odds with Innovative Solutions
With two decades of deep industry knowledge, 700Credit foresaw the shift toward prequalification—the ability to foretell an individual’s creditworthiness—in the industry and proactively offered innovative solutions to support this growing trend. One such innovation is the integration of the soft pull prequalification feature into dealership website and sales processes. Whether seamlessly incorporated into a dealership’s digital retailing solution or featured as a standalone prequalification application on the website, the integration allows potential car buyers to check their creditworthiness by providing basic demographic information, without impacting their credit score.
The prequalification feature on the dealer’s website provides precise payment estimates at the beginning of the sales journey, attracting consumers browsing the site to make purchase decisions faster. Meanwhile the dealership gains valuable insights into the consumer’s credit score and existing loan balances even before the initial conversation, empowering them to make effective offers earlier in the sales process.
In a notable instance, a dealership group with over 200 stores adopted 700Credit’s prequalification platform. The client reported a threefold increase in the call center’s size to handle the volume of leads generated through the websites post the platform’s implementation.
Amid increased number of leads, dealers face a rising threat of fraud from customers as well as due to non-adherence to compliance. This requires them to take measures to prevent consumer-initiated fraud, such as identity forgery, while simultaneously adhering to the Federal Trade Commission’s guidelines for consumer protection.
700Credit’s QuickScan solution covers the blind spots in the digital retail processes for both consumers and dealerships. It allows clients to electronically capture their documents, store them in a secure environment, and run them through powerful likeness detection, identity verification, and synthetic ID fraud tools. This dual-purpose approach tackles fraud at the inception of the sales process while ensuring compliance with FTC regulations.
Understanding the solution’s benefits, a dealership group planned to implement 700Credit’s driver’s license verification tools across their 60 stores over 3 to 4 months. The platform’s efficacy became evident on the first day of implementation in the initial store, where an attempt of fraud was successfully identified and prevented. The immediate impact led the group to accelerate the rollout plan, which 700Credit achieved within a week.
Apart from these solutions, the company provides a diverse range of products including income & employment verification and compliance consulting, to simplify the journey.
Gaining Success through Market Awareness
Three key sources of information drive 700Credit’s products. The prime one is engaging with customers—listening to dealerships, understanding their workflows, and actively discussing regulatory changes that impact their operations. This enables the company to ascertain the appropriateness of solutions, potential refinements, and how seamlessly these solutions can be integrated into the dealerships’ processes.
It also emphasizes listening to its extensive network of integration partners to gain insights into the challenges they aim to address for dealerships. This two-way communication ensures a mutual understanding of the services, data, or support needed to achieve shared goals.
Staying attuned to industry competitors forms the third crucial component. The company gains valuable insights by monitoring competitors’ strategies and responses to dealership needs.
Through this streamlined and collaborative approach, the company boards over 250 dealers a day, aided by its experienced leadership, sales, marketing, customer support, and compliance teams.
Through its nimble approach and adept responsiveness to varying market demands, 700Credit solidifies its leadership in the automotive industry. It sprints toward assisting a growing number of dealerships whose mission is to address every potential gap in the sales process and take customer satisfaction to the next level.
Media Contact
Susan Burke
sburke@700credit.com
(616) 240-9853
