Customer Development
Imagine if you had to rate your opinion of Justin Bieber on a scale of 1-10, but your knowledge of him was limited strictly to his album sales. Further, if you tried to do an online search of him, the only information returned to you would be his album sales. According to Billboard, the Biebs’ latest album, Purpose, hit #1 on the charts late last year. Not only that, it was his 6th album to make it to the top of the charts, and it sold the largest weekly unit total for an album since Billboard updated their tracking methodology in 2014. Based on that criteria alone, you’d probably have to give him a 10.
Now imagine if the Biebernator showed up on your doorstep with his (possibly fake) eyeglasses, a full turtleneck covering all tattoos, and a totally normal hairstyle, AND he was asking to date your daughter. And again, all you had by means of judgment—other than his slight, clean-cut appearance—was this “opinion rating system” based strictly on album performance. You’d probably not just give your immediate full approval, you’d also hope for them to get married as soon as possible, and you might even be secretly jealous of your daughter for landing such a wholesome little high-achiever.
Fortunately, album sales are not the only data points we have to evaluate Bieberlicious—or many other things in life, for that matter. Curiously, though, when it comes to lending, many businesses are voluntarily limiting their knowledge of customers by not accessing all of the available data points.
A perfect example of this is the auto finance industry, in which many lenders only have a narrow view of loan applicants across one portfolio of products. If they could only expand their range to include customer behavior across multiple lines of products, they’d be able to make much better decisions and therefore improve profitability.
This expanded view of customer behavior is exactly what FICO can bring to auto lenders. In addition to our world-renowned scoring system, we can also provide solutions that will integrate our scores with your existing data, and we can create a decision framework that will enable optimized lending.
In the short video below, part 4 in our automotive finance series, we explain how it works and how we can quickly expand your customer view to inform better decisions.
Please check it out, and also visit our auto finance industry page for more details on how we can help your business maximize its performance. And be sure to read my blog post on part 3 in this video series.
