Richard Cox, Head of Motor Operations gives us insight into the world of great customer service and the importance of team training. 

At the core of our customer service delivery is Richard Cox, who heads up our V12 Vehicle Finance and Moneyway operational teams.  Richard has over 20 years' experience in the motor industry, first starting out his career in dealerships.  Richard understands the dealer's perspective, what is important to them and also what the frustration points can be.

"When I worked in dealerships, I found a great deal of satisfaction in helping customers to find the car they wanted.  I know from my experience, that it is also vital that motor dealers do everything that they can to ensure that their customer care levels are as high as possible and this experience helped me to remain customer focused throughout my career in the industry".

How do you help your teams?

Every week we have a team meeting.  It's a floor huddle in normal circumstances, which we currently do via video call.  We share good news stories for the week, reflect on service levels, give recognition to our team members who have passed training qualifications or achieved a career milestone and we share positive feedback from colleagues and external customers.  Our team are encouraged to recognise great service by nominating colleagues for the monthly 'Customer Service Excellence Award' and through our 'Thank A Colleague' scheme. This helps us keep customer service "front-of-mind" and is a positive way to start a meeting. We always finish the meeting with a quiz . 

Why is training so important for your teams?

Our team need to understand the motor finance market to be able to fully understand our customer needs and expectations.  We educate our team on the 'used car market' space, including the different types of customer channels such as franchises, independents and brokers, the different types of customer journeys and of course the regulatory requirements.

We also train our team on delivering good customer service, as we know, poor service is far more talked about than good service. Having good customer service is absolutely essential to our success.

To ensure that we have a culture of good customer service running throughout our business, its important our team are on board with our service level and quality commitments.   We also promote continuous process improvements and provide the team with training to help identify where there might be opportunities to improve what we do.  Our teams really understand how important those touch points with our dealers and brokers are.  Our aim is to be efficient and easy to do business with.

What have your team been focusing on, to improve the dealer service?

• Speed and Ease - we have improved our service levels and made it quicker to get payouts and resolutions.
• Introduced digital solutions to reduce manual documentation, including Open Banking and e-Sign capability
• Dealer setup - we have simplified our processes and made it so much easier to get dealers up and running.

Getting in touch with us....

The most important thing is that you can speak to a member of the team if you need help.  We cross train our new business team so they can support on a range of onboarding enquiries.  We're open 7 days a week including Bank Holidays.

You can contact us on 0345 111 7125 and choose option 1.  Our teams are available from:

• 9am - 7pm Monday to Friday
• 9am - 5pm on Saturdays
• 10am - 4pm on Sundays

When we look for people to join our teams, we look for Superstar's, because the most valuable asset we have is our people.