Delivering Delightful Customer Experience in Equipment Finance

In the last decade, some of the biggest game-changers have been companies that redefined customer experience by creating a comprehensive customer journey surrounding the core products or services.

Customer Experience (CX) is the new battleground of competitive differentiation in equipment finance. But victory in this battleground is not easy. To be successful in the digital age, one must ace the art of delivering a seamless, multi-channel, timely, and highly customized customer experience.

Unfortunately, legacy tech or paper-based workflows were never built to deliver the kind of speed, agility, and flexibility that customers expect today. Some organizations might get around the problem temporarily by investing in smaller piecemeal technologies. But eventually, this only creates complex, spaghetti systems that are difficult to manage, are rigid, and hinder business growth.

Companies in the equipment finance space need to assess and realign their core capabilities. Here are the three strategies that equipment finance companies could adopt to create more friction-less, linear journeys across all customer touchpoints and engagement models.

Agility is ‘THE’ Competitive Differentiator in a Crowded Marketplace

Today, agility doesn’t just mean signing up for a cloud-based service or designing a new mobile app. Agility means leveraging automation to create streamlined processes in the backend, using data to gauge customer sentiment, and then building omnichannel market strategies to deliver products/services to the customers via their preferred platforms.

Equipment finance companies that want to do this must rethink their core operations. Adopting an integrated end-to-end lease management platform eliminates the friction between existing processes, enabling the organization to deliver a faster and superlative customer experience. It is critical to choose an infrastructure that provides a standard baseline and yet is flexible enough for building a host of capabilities atop those standard modules.

Many of Odessa’s customers who have taken their first steps in the digitization journey are now able to leverage advanced technologies like chatbots, training them to field a customer’s account-related questions on self-service portals. They are leveraging APIs to integrate third-party applications and create an ecosystem that helps orchestrate multi-pronged responses to servicing customer’s needs.

The Covid-19 crisis has provided a glimpse into a future world, a world in which digital channels become the primary and, in some cases, the sole customer engagement model. It's a world in which automated processes become a primary driver for productivity, agile ways of working are a prerequisite to meeting seemingly daily changes in customer behaviour. Built on this foundation of data and automation, the equipment finance software you choose can help you phase into more sophisticated orchestrations of the customer experience.

Data is in the Center of this Customer-driven Universe

According to a Forbes Insights survey, the benefits of evolving to data-driven customer experiences (data-driven CX) are wide-ranging, including enhancing revenue generation and enabling cost reduction, as well as accelerating process efficiencies and quality improvements.

Customer history, credit scores, transactional data and data about market insights can help equipment finance companies identify each customer based on their unique needs and deliver products/services catering to their unique requirements. The process, however, begins with building friction-less processes in the backend that enables an uninterrupted flow of data across functions, creating a single, centralized version of the truth.

With the right data strategy, companies can ask themselves questions like: ‘Can I use data to predict whether a customer is going to extend its big term?’ or ‘What data construct suggests that customers will come in early?’. The idea is to drive a culture of decision making that is based on an analytical approach to customer behaviour patterns and not necessarily on preconceived notions of customer preference.

Also, for many equipment finance providers, processes around compliance and security are still highly manual, involving a lot of paperwork. By integrating technology into your workflow, you can automate your financial and security data management to improve efficiencies and reduce fraud risk. Not only does this provide more complete data to understand customers, but it also unlocks time to concentrate on understanding the client’s requirements and how they can fulfil them.

Keeping Customers in the Heart of Product Design and Innovation

Traditionally, financing has been an industrial product. But this paradigm is changing. New and upcoming competitors in the asset finance industry are not only focused on costs or greater technological prowess. For companies to convince customers that they're acting in their best interests, they need to do more than sell products that are affordable or even at the leanest rates.

At its heart, it is the recognition that the core product is no longer just financing. The product is the experience and financing is merely one link in that overall value chain. There is flexibility in this new model to define new products, products that are based or tied to how the customer consumes the underlying assets on a lease contract.

When we talk about innovation in equipment finance and product innovation, we're confronted by a few competing forces. One, the need to be competitive in a crowded landscape. Second, the need to define timely and multifaceted go to market strategies. And third, the imperative to implement technology infrastructures, to run our businesses. Bundling value-added services above and beyond the core financial offerings are going to defining criteria for a successful equipment finance organization in the years to come.

Odessa is working with the leading equipment finance companies to create holistic, unparalleled customer experiences. To find the right solution for your business click here.