Carfinance247 increased conversion with Twilio

Carfinance247 offers a wide range of car finance products to motorists across the UK. After selling their first online car classified business to the RAC, the co-founders of Carfinance247 discovered that consumers were having difficulty finding suitable financing options to buy their next car.

The problem

Before integrating Twilio Voice, Carfinance247 – the UK’s leading online car finance broker – was losing out on an estimated 100 potential new customers a day due to their call handling setup.

The team routed all calls through an on-premise VOiP solution. Every agent had a soft phone installed on the desktop, along with a headset.

“It was very much a black box setup,” says Technology Director, Jon Wilson. “Very frustrating for developers, and we had to rely on third party support.”

The Carfinance247 team found that not only were they missing out on a large amount of data now integrated into customer calls, they were also unable to gather meaningful data.

“We had little visibility in terms of caller stats,” says Jon, “and the stats we did have didn’t believe them, we couldn’t trust them. Or even properly queue people.”

Jon realised that sourcing a new phone solution was now a top priority.

A happy accident

While visiting one of their partners, Amigo Loans, Jon noticed that their sales agents were handling and logging calls direct from their browser – all via the Twilio API.

“My eyes lit up,” says Jon. “All ideas of purchasing a new phone system in the same vein as our old one went out the window. Within a week we had a proof of concept of Twilio softphone in a browser being able to place and take calls. The floodgates opened and the ideas started flowing.”

CRM and communication data becomes one

Prior to Twilio, the Carfinance247 teams found that their call data and CRM data were separate, and they found it very hard to connect the two.

“When we saw Twilio, we realised that the data becomes one,” says Jon. “The communication data is our CRM and we can closely link the two. Within a month we had a team of 8 agents using Twilio. That team had a queue, they had a wallboard, they had compliance, dashboards … we could easily connect in and out-bound calls direct to a customer.”

As a loan application goes through many stages, from approval to fraud checks, being able to tie a call to the lifecycle of a customer journey meant that agents could do their job much more efficiently.

And of course this also creates happier customers, as they don’t have to continually repeat information to new agents every time.

Results: a conversion uplift

“We approve about 55% of all applications,” says Jon. “We can only convert what we get approved, so we look at a conversion rate of approvals to deals. After installing Twilio we had around 12% uplift in that conversion, which is significant in terms of revenus and obviously profitability.”

Carfinance247 now uses Twilio across the business. Enjoying their new found flexibility, the team is looking to experiment with new Twilio tools in future, such as IP messaging.

“I won’t say Twilio revolutionised the business, but … my estimation of 100 people every day having a bad experience and being unable to call us, well this problem just vanished overnight.”