GM Financial’s Lenneman Banks On Digital To Improve Customer Journey

The vice-president of digital at the Dallas-based financial services arm of GM Motors hopes the tools he is putting in place will “drive both applications and customer satisfaction.”

GM Financial became the full captive finance company of GM Motors back in 2014 with a mission to provide lending to a broad mix of its parent’s end-customers and dealers, supporting around 16,000 dealerships across 20 countries. Vice-president of digital Ken Lenneman is now spearheading the Dallas-based organisation’s digital transformation, while simultaneously managing its rapid growth, something he describes as “driving the car down the road and building it at the same time.” When CMO.com caught up with him, we began by asking him about GM Financial’s target audiences.

Lenneman: We support all GM brands in the US, so it is pretty broad. The demographic for a Chevy compared to a Cadillac is pretty different, so we are reaching out to a vast number of very diverse customers.

Those different demographics have different expectations too, and we want to make sure we have the underlying digital technology that will allow us to provide the right types of experiences, information, processes, and flow based on what we know about those users and their needs.

CMO.com: What does digital transformation entail for GM Financial?

Lenneman: Since becoming the full captive finance company of GM Motors a couple of years ago, we have set about formalising the marketing and digital team here, and the digital transformation is a part of that.

Initially, GM only had a couple of boxes on their website around financing. We have spent months with them defining this customer journey because it is essential that our role is an integral part of the process early on. The transformation will ensure that the customer journey is integrated, and that GM Financial is a big part of that journey when customers are asking how much they can afford, whether they should buy or lease, and how they should pay. All of that is very important. We have worked closely with GM to ensure all of this links seamlessly together with the right tools and information.

CMO.com:What stage are you at on your digital journey?

Lenneman: We used our current foundation to make some improvements to our digital properties and made our sites responsive because so many people are using mobile devices to access the information now. We’ve made some real strides. Our Net Promoter Score (NPS) before these fundamental changes was negative, and now we are above what we expected to be—an increase of over 30 points.

We are also developing a mobile app that we’ll introduce in a few months, and we are revamping our end-of-lease process. A large part of that will be based on Adobe digital technology, which we plan to introduce within a year. As we continue to integrate our systems with GM, we aim to provide a joined-up experience no matter what stage the customer is at in their journey—whether they are just learning about the vehicle or whether they are at the end of their lease. We are further ahead in some areas than in others—we’re not there yet.

CMO.com: Which factors do you think helped to prompt the rise of your NPS score so dramatically?

Lenneman: The biggest change was around making our website responsive, enabling customers to access it easily on their mobile, particularly the “my account” pages, and being able to log in and pay a bill.

Another important factor is our customer-centric approach. We looked at our customers’ journeys and identified what was most important to them, which was chiefly being able to pay a bill and set automated payments. We re-engineered these key processes to make them simpler and more efficient, and in doing so we nearly halved the number of steps it takes for someone to get online and pay a bill. Our goal is to continue to refine these journeys even more, especially with the mobile platform we are building.

We also added a lot of online help. We really got a sense of where people were getting hung up and we tried to provide more help contextually within the process. We also added a live chat facility, so that if we noticed someone having an issue, we could be proactive and pop up a box saying: “Can we help you?” Our post-chat surveys have shown that the additional help has been very well received.

CMO.com: How did you decide what to change within the customer journeys?

Lenneman: We got a lot of customer feedback across numerous channels. We used Medallia to gather feedback online and from our call centres, and it was pretty obvious where we could make improvements.

Secondly, we carried out competitive benchmarking with a few key players in the industry, as well as with companies outside of the industry—the automotive sector isn’t the only place you go to pay a bill. Within the constraints of our existing system, we were able to improve a number of things. When we move on to the new platform and make some fundamental technology shifts at the back-end, we will do even better.

CMO.com: How else are you using digital in your marketing activity ?

Lenneman: We recently hired a social media person, but social is in its infancy as we put together a strategy. In the past we largely used social for recruiting and now that is expanding into our marketing.

We are just starting to pull together our email marketing too. Historically, we used email marketing to help attract customers into their dealerships, but we are looking to expand that into other areas now. I’ve just hired someone from an agency who is helping us with our digital marketing strategy and developing partnerships with key automotive websites to start to drive customers to us.

We believe that through our digital properties—plus email, social media, and display, for example—in addition to our end-of-lease programme and some of our retention efforts, we can drive hundreds of thousands of applications into our dealer network in a way that provides an exceptional customer experience and customer journey. Regardless of whether customers want to learn more about financing or more about a vehicle, we believe that the tools we are putting in place will drive both applications and customer satisfaction by providing the right information at the right time. It’s all about providing intuitive information based on understanding what a customer needs and when.

CMO.com: How is your marketing team set up?

Lenneman: Our senior vice-president of marketing communications is Will Stacy—I work under him. His team includes a brand team that also runs our design, such as print ads, a comms team (social media also sits under comms at this point), and an analytics group. We also have a UX group, a front-end group (which will soon become a dedicated content management development group), product managers who ensure that customer journeys are pleasing our customers and meeting our business goals, and a digital marketing person, who is responsible for our relationships with automotive sites, for example. We are very closely aligned with GM in Detroit too, so we have a guy there who helps us to integrate our digital initiatives with GM. That is my team.

CMO.com: How has your team changed shape as marketing has evolved?

Lenneman: It has grown exponentially. We were probably in the neighbourhood of between 10 and 20 people 18 months ago, and now we have 60 to 70 folks in our marketing comms team. We are all on this journey of integration with GM, as well as a digital transformation, with the aim of taking our vast customer base and making sure we develop the right experiences. As we learn more and continue to grow, we keep adding different pieces.

CMO.com: How easy is it to find the right skills as you grow your marketing team?

Lenneman: It hasn’t been easy, especially here, in Dallas, where there is so much growth and, therefore, competition for digital marketers. It is so important as you build an organisation to find the right people, and one of the frustrations is that we haven’t been able to grow as fast as we would want to because we haven’t been able to do that.

CMO.com: What are your goals going forward?

Lenneman: A year from now, we want the base Adobe platform in place with the key components and basic integrations—but that is just the beginning. After that it is about optimisation and personalisation, and identifying the sub-journeys, which involves taking a closer look at key parts of the process such as determining affordability and onboarding. We’ll also identify how we can make those moments better by differentiating one persona or market group from another.

There is a theory that customers double their expectations every 18 months. Going forward, I don’t see us just benchmarking ourselves against other banks and other finance companies. People base their expectations on everything they do on the web, whether buying from Amazon or spending time on Facebook, for example. We have to constantly keep up with that in order to meet—and to exceed—their expectations.