Bumper co-founder and CEO James Jackson explains why a concentrate on service has never been more vital for dealers than it’s today.
The automotive industry is undoubtedly one of the crucial dynamic on this planet. It’s a sector that lives and breathes on innovation, with those businesses innovating fastest and deepest at all times winning. Consumers are quick to vote with their wallets if a brand comes out with something they’re eager to get a chunk of.
Whether you might be a manufacturer or dealer, maintaining competitive advantage is not any longer just concerning the vehicles you make and sell; it’s about product, service and brand seamlessly combining to inform consumers that that is the one for them.
But delivering that vision is harder today than ever before. The fee-of-living crisis, which isn’t going away anytime soon, has led any automobile owner or buyer to contemplate their options more deeply than I even have seen in my lifetime. And that is true no matter where you sit on the income spectrum: the old cliches that go together with owners of certain marques really don’t apply, and the squeeze on household funds is being felt from top to bottom.
With consumers across Europe feeling this pinch, the necessity for more flexible ways to pay for automobile repairs is vitally vital, and probably the most successful dealers wish to ensure they’ll provide customers every reason to book them in there after which. The barriers to a customer saying “yes” are higher than ever, and it’s incumbent on dealers to make sure they do all the pieces they’ll to lower these barriers as much as possible.
Barriers
While a number of the solutions to this issue will not be purely financial, removing the non-public finance barrier is one with a comparatively limited level of difficulty. Dealers have the flexibility to supply a variety of flexible financing terms that may take a weight off their customers, while ultimately speeding-up the time to buy and driving incremental revenue.
Partners like Bumper have a critical role to play in supporting dealers in delivering this. Our journey began with an easy yet powerful idea: to make automobile repairs less financially burdensome for owners, while empowering dealerships with advanced payment solutions to enable those customers to go ahead with the repairs and upgrades they need. Delivering a product to fulfill this easy mission has ultimately driven our growth, and the endorsement of $48 million in investment announced recently from investors including JLR’s InMotion Ventures and Porsche Ventures is a hugely positive moment for us.
While Bumper is already available through 5,000 dealers, enabling greater than 250,000 repairs up to now yr alone, our goal is to double this number annually – that’s where we predict the market goes, with combined and aligned dealer/consumer demands driving it. For this reason our funding round, led by Autotech Ventures and bolstered by Shell Ventures, along with each JLR and Porsche, is about greater than capital: it’s a powerful vote of confidence in our vision to change into the go-to payment platform for dealers anywhere on this planet.
There has never been a more vital time for dealers to think concerning the service elements of their business, and I’m excited to be working with the most important automotive brands on this planet to make their customers’ car-owning lives simpler, easier and fewer pressured than ever before.
James Jackson is CEO of Bumper, which helps drivers split repair bills into interest-free payments, working with lots of the world’s biggest automotive brands including JLR, Porsche, Volvo, Ford, Nissan, and VW Group.
This Article First Appeared At www.am-online.com
