By Brooke Fernandez

Radical dealership technology should automatically engage and satisfy customers. It should increase business through traditional and new channels – all along the customer’s purchase journey. It must generate income and repeat business 24/7 without requiring hands-on staff time.

Vehicle service protection is one F&I product line now being marketed and sold via innovative all-digital technology. A self-serve customer engagement platform enables your dealership to market and sell to buyers of high mileage vehicles at any point along their customer journey without F&I having to lift a finger.

Consider these five reasons why technology like this will revolutionize how dealers sell service contracts and re-capture lost VSC sales opportunities:

• No start-up fees.
• Gives dealers a new way to make money without having to rewrite the loan.
• Customers can purchase online by logging onto your dealership-branded VSC site to complete the only end-to-end buying experience of its kind.
• Sales are seamless. Dealers earn commission dollars without lifting a finger.
• The platform automatically mines the dealer’s DMS to identify lost opportunities and remarkets those lost leads to recapture lost revenue for the dealer.

Self-serve online F&I technology like this brings advanced sales throughput to a dealership while expanding its market reach and penetrating new market demographics. It promises to give new and used car dealers a new way to offer protection services to a wider group of customers.

This sophisticated yet hands-off portal resides in the Cloud and the F&I desktop. Customers selecting coverage for their higher mileage vehicles may finance the purchase through a vehicle installment loan or finance it directly through funding sources integrated into this platform. Either way, dealers earn commission on every sale.

A new wave

This portal is the latest example of how technology continues to revolutionize vehicle and F&I sales. From emerging virtual reality engagement devices to shopper behavior analysis, digital innovation promotes, markets, and sells vehicles and ancillary products seamlessly. In cases like dealer-branded self-serve portals, timelessly and tirelessly.

The portal would also expand a dealership’s reach beyond traditional channels and broaden the demographics it can now seamlessly service. Dealers using this technology will see an increase in their VSC sales – and a built-in VSC remarketing engine brings more revenue potential to dealers using it.

VSC closing rates average 35-40%. After separating out the potential lease and cash customers who don’t buy service contracts, most dealers are leaving considerable VSC revenue on the table. Revenue that most dealers rarely pursue after the sale.

Using self-serve digital VSC sales and remarketing technology, dealers can:

• Expand VSC sales into new markets and buyer demographics
• Re-target lost VSC and vehicle sales opportunities; VSC remarketing can typically close 15% of retargeted opportunities. At the average dealer profit on a VCS, the upside is significant.
• Engage customers where they are, at the time convenient to them. No irritating phone calls or direct mail. Instead, providing a menu of plan benefits and prices to mix and match to fit their risk profile and budget.

Dealers can experience this radical new VSC sales engine April 11-13, at the Tampa (Fla.) Convention Center, booth 729 at Digital Dealer 22, the leading technology-based conference for automotive dealership profitability tools.

Attended by 90% of the nation’s leading dealer groups, Digital Dealer Conferences set the pace among auto dealers, GMs, and their marketing and technology staffs to learn how to be leaner, faster, more transparent, and more productive.

This new technology forever changes VSC sales outcomes:

• Provides a powerful tool for remarketing to customers who declined to purchase a VSC when buying their vehicle.
• Helps monetize leads that either did not convert the first time or converted as a vehicle sale but not a service contract.
• Leverages the power of peer review, by providing web-based customer experience reviews from TrustPilot, so consumers trust the site, its content, and VSC providers represented.

ForeverCar is the vehicle service contract industry’s only technology portal providing engaging and intuitive decisioning for consumers, whether interacting with the tool in a dealership’s finance office or online. It is the only portal of its kind that markets VSC sales to a dealer’s customer database to help dealers monetize those original investments.

About the author:

Brooke Fernandez, VP of Business Development at ForeverCar, is a seasoned sales and marketing executive who brings a range of B2B enterprise experience in the technology arena — and now tackling the inefficiencies of the extended warranty market. She earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and a master’s degree from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Brooke is integral in ForeverCar’s mission to transform the extended warranty space using technology, transparency and big data to modernize the industry.