Industries and case studies - Financial Services

Case study: Farmers

“eCom's solutions allowed us to meet our aggressive business plans and make significant cost savings” says John Doherty, Customer Services Manager, Farmers RFS

Reduced cost

Increased competitive advantages

Improved customer service

Increased market share

Credit finance is a critical component of the Farmers RFS business. It’s a key pathway by which new customers and new sales are made, and the speed and accuracy with which applications are processed has a major influence on how the company is seen to deliver on customer service.

Farmers wanted to improve customer service and gain significant competitive advantages in this increasingly competitive market. How well they did this would affect their ability to deliver on aggressive business plans.

John, did you get a good return on your investment?
The return on investment was significant. We had 18 people involved in business processing at the time, and after implementation we reduced that number to eight.

After a year 70% of our anticipated ROI had been delivered. Some hadn’t but that was because of our reluctance to retrench some positions. Two years down the track the savings on costs and staff numbers had been delivered, and more.

And there were other benefits, including better customer service, faster turnaround time of applications, more accurate information and better information for Farmers to analyse its customers. These and other advantages enabled us to attack other markets that we hadn’t been in before.

Tell us about the scale of the operation.
New business applications were around 250 to 400 per day. Add in other enquiries, such as customer services, fraud and collections – which often require us to look up historical information – bring the number to around 1000 applications and enquiries a week.

Why did Farmers choose eCom?
We did due diligence on a number of companies based on international standards that Farmers had set. Midstream we changed what we were looking for. eCom was able to change and react. They got very involved in our business and made sure they understood it well.

Retail is fast paced, what’s happening in the stores early in the week can change significantly by the weekend. So we had to have a system and company that was flexible and could respond quickly.

Did eCom over deliver in some areas? Did they think outside the square?
Some of what they proposed we had no idea, we just took their word for it, as they knew the technology so it was difficult for us to assess. We got a few surprises; in that the move from the numbers we had, to the numbers that we were told, happened relatively quickly, the ease that the staff accepted the changes for the document storage and retrieval, aspect was good and how it improved their jobs.

Was this a major project?
Yes, it involved the head of department, and it impacted operations as well. We were changing our culture – credit applications are central to our business. The change was significant from two perspectives: changing the behaviour and attitude of staff within RFS, and changing dealers’ expectations as to how applications would be treated and responded to.

Do you think you’ve gained competitive advantages as a result?
Because we can now provide better responses to applications, the answer’s certainly yes. We can put our hand on our heart and say we capture information more accurately now. It reduces the embarrassment of things like going back with an approval for someone and giving them a different surname than the one that they wrote on the application.

So you’re talking about better customer service?
Well, that’s just one example. There are lots of others, like speed of applications, accuracy and our ability to provide a better service to other parts of the Farmers business. So Farmers knew a lot more information about their customers. We could guarantee so many minutes turnaround time.

We now run a streamlined 24 x 7 business, which is what retail credit really is. Running this type of business can be a real headache with rostering and Christmas holidays. Because the need for critical people on each shift was reduced, that headache’s reduced.

All this helped us to increase the market to other non-Farmers businesses such as Michael Hill.

Did eCom automate many decisions?
Yes, based on a scorecard and some business rules. eCom worked with us on some of the business rules and the scorecard was already set. Some of the business rules we fed in at the input section so it would decline those people right at the beginning. The obvious rule is being under age: you have to be 18 to get credit. The same applied to signatures on applications. And things like if you haven’t been two years with your current job or address. So the system eliminated many decisions for the operators that used to take hours and were now reduced to seconds.