Ford Credit gets personal with leasing process

DETROIT — Ford Credit last month launched two pilot programs to ease the lease return and renewal process for customers. The pilots are the captive's latest steps toward improving the lease-end experience, which has been a recent focus for the lender and its peers.

The industry's lease-end experience has been a pain point for many customers, often with uncoordinated communication among the dealer, lender and automaker.

Many have said improving lease-end customer satisfaction requires a more digital and personalized experience.

Ford Credit's pilots — personal lease assistants and personalized online vehicle offers — aim to meet both of those standards.

"We continue to look at ways to improve this process and to also ensure that we're not only making it easier for customers to renew into that next vehicle, that we're building anticipation around what that next vehicle could be — and that we're also driving loyalty back to Ford, Lincoln and our dealers," Krista Conyers, Ford Credit's director of customer experience, said last week.

The lease assistants work with about 1,000 customers from select dealerships in Philadelphia and New York to navigate the lease-end process four months before the scheduled expiration date. Each customer is assigned a team, and team members will have everything they need to know about the customer's account, avoiding the issue of bouncing someone around to representatives who are unfamiliar with the account.

The personalized offer platform, "Drive New. Now," shows customers a vehicle it believes they're likely to lease next and a payment estimate. The featured vehicle is on the lot of the customer's originating dealership. If customers lease a 2016 Edge, for example, they likely would see a 2019 Edge in the same trim level. Or they could choose an upgraded offer, such as a 2019 Explorer on the same lot.

"We're really excited about this, because with this new project we have been able to deliver to customers the right vehicle at the right time," Conyers said. "We're not showing you an F-150 that you could go build; we are showing you a real-life vehicle sitting in your dealer's inventory."

The captive started the pilot with lease customers, but if successful it plans to expand to finance customers, Conyers said. Because about 300,000 Ford customers' leases expire each year, "we knew we can make a direct impact right now today with those customers," she said.

Over the past few years, Ford Credit has aimed to revamp lease-end communication.

In December 2017, the captive launched a personal web page within its account manager application for lease customers. The web page tells customers when their lease agreement will end, shows their mileage and outlines excess wear-and-use standards.

With the lease assistants and "Drive New. Now," Conyers said, Ford Credit wanted to redefine the lease-end process, recasting it as an easy renewal process, "which is a whole different concept because lease-end implies that you're coming to the end of a relationship," Conyers said. "Easy renewal implies that you're continuing that relationship, and we want this to be about continuing this relationship every two to three years. We're really focusing now on renewing, building anticipation about that next vehicle."