Once a customer expresses genuine interest in a purchase from your dealership, your team can’t afford to waste any time completing the sale. This is most important in F&I, where compliance, paperwork, and other tedious details can throw a wrench in the process if you don’t have efficient, streamlined steps in place.
Manually entering information repeatedly throughout the process is the biggest source of inefficiency during F&I. Reducing manual tasks with a streamlined process will reduce wasted time, save money, and eliminate headaches during the lending process. Here are five ways how.
Simplifying Deal Processing
Lead sources come from a variety of places — walk-ins, credit applications, lender preapprovals, shows, and more — so you need to be prepared to pick up and close deals efficiently. Ensure your F&I software integrates with your DMS information to import proposed deal information like inventory type, inventory stock number, mileage, price, customer information, and more. By syncing your data, you’ll eliminate rekeying information and avoid making customers repeat information they’ve already provided.
When creating a deal from scratch, your tools should walk you through a step-by-step process with required fields to prevent oversights and populate applicable information throughout the structured deal. This functionality protects information accuracy and saves time.
Connecting With Lenders
This situation may sound familiar: When you’re looking for financing options for your customer’s purchase, you have to log in to multiple lender portals to confirm the customer’s eligibility for the application, see which forms are required, and check how to complete each document.
Logging in to various portals may seem like a small inconvenience, but navigating between multiple tabs can frustrate your team as they check lending requirements while engaging their customer. The biggest time saver is connecting all your lender partners to a central hub that provides a consolidated view of loan options with only one sign-in.
By comparing all your customer’s loan options in one screen, your F&I managers can quickly review the best options and see whether the customer meets the lender’s requirements. Your employees can also clearly see which factors may be a concern or require more details to receive loan approval.
Implementing Form Batches
Once an F&I manager has determined which lender to submit a loan application to, it’s time to complete the necessary documentation. Compiling every single form for a loan requires a complex and tedious checklist. Without a standard process, your team may struggle to ensure every document is accounted for and completed correctly.
It might only take seconds to pull a form if you’re experienced, but those seconds add up with each form and each deal. If you print or use the wrong forms, you also waste materials. Form batching reduces these issues and increases efficiency. It’s as close to a set-it-and-forget-it process as you’ll get in F&I.
For each lender and loan type, you can rely on preset forms lists to tell you which documents are required, and whether they can be completed digitally or need wet-ink signatures. Even if you add your own lenders, you only need to create a form batch once, simplifying future transactions. This approach eliminates the need to remember or recreate form sets, ensuring consistency and accuracy in dealing with various lenders.
Streamlining Deal Submission
As some lenders move toward digitization, they may accept loan documents with electronic signatures or even via digital submission rather than overnighted mail. Digital options are great for reducing material resources like ink and paper, saving money in shipping costs, and avoiding risk when sending personally identifiable information in the mail.
If you take advantage of these features, it’s important to use a secure connection to transmit forms and deal information. Depending on the lender, you may be able to electronically upload and send credit applications, pay stubs, or customer ID information, enhancing security and minimizing liability risks.
Customizing Your System
Check your F&I and sales tools for settings that would optimize F&I efficiency. Examples could include setting default taxes, fees, or back-end product information. Or set up alerts for lender decisions, deal progress, and more so you can act quickly to close deals.
Eliminating duplicate entry, streamlining deal structures, connecting to various lenders, and improving the overall lending process improves efficiency, saves money, reduces employee stress, and mitigates your dealership’s risk. By leveraging comprehensive and integrated F&I solutions, you’ll streamline processes, reduce errors, and ultimately improve the overall customer experience.
