4:51 pm, March 29, 2019
IT’S been a great start to 2019 at First Response Finance. We were recently handed a Gold Trusted Service Award by Feefo for the reviews we have received on its website.
This award is a seal of excellence, recognising businesses for delivering exceptional experiences to customers.
This was the second year running that we received this award and gives us an awareness that we are continuing in the right direction from a consumer’s point of view.
Then we were placed in the Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work For list for the ninth year running. We entered the list back in 2011 in the small companies category.
As we have grown over time, we have now moved into the mid-sized companies category. It’s always great to be a part of this list and we use our score each year as a benchmark, then focus on areas for continuous improvement.
The best companies result gives us awareness of what needs to be improved and that we are continuing in the right direction from an employee’s point of view.
While some of you may think ‘Who cares?’, we think it’s important for us to celebrate these achievements and not just to believe that they’re guaranteed, or normal.
A lot of time and effort is invested every year into our workplace and our people development.
We don’t do these continuous improvements solely to make sure our employees are all happy and enjoying their work, but also to make sure they’re equipped with the knowledge to provide a great service to our dealer partners and to our consumers.
In a highly competitive market, we’ve needed to keep improving our service and products to be sure that they are worthy of gaining these awards.
Those of you that use us regularly will be aware that First Response has been on this journey for a while now. We’re a company that wants to continually evolve and improve and no area is to be missed.
As such, we have recently extended our lending criteria, meaning that we are providing finance over a number of different lending tiers.
While we haven’t really shouted about these tiers, it’s another improvement that has helped us to offer a great non-prime product and has allowed flexibility for our motor dealer partners, helping them to move more vehicles than was previously possible.
We continue to assist motor dealers with far more than just getting their customers a great vehicle finance package. We have added value to them via joint advertising and marketing campaigns, bespoke point-of-sale merchandise and signs, and with regulatory guidance and digital marketing guides and much more.
Next up for us to benchmark is our service to dealers, and as such we will be producing another Dealer Survey to measure our dealer service and products, assessing if they have provided any improvements or caused any issues.
We hope to continue strongly through 2019. For those of you that haven’t used us in a while or not at all, there’s never been a better time to sign up as a motor dealer partner.
Ben Garside is marketing manager for First Response. Call him on 07817 518739 or email [email protected]
