Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Loan Extension - Customers love it and so will you !

Extensions – can be a offering for 1 day, 5 days, 1- 30 days, etc.  In Bravo your Extension offering can be customized for your own company, so when an item that is in pawn is selected, a dialog pops up, shows the daily charge, click and collect what ever the customer has or days they want. It then extends/amends the loan and handles all of the administration and accounting.  Manually extensions are very difficult to track, in Bravo it is easier than a rewrite.  Bravo is able to differentiate the charges that allowed by California law.



Why would you want to offer this service?  Isn't it too hard?

1.       It’s a way to offer an additional customer service offering – more options for your customer to keep their stuff.
2.       It’s a way to get customers to come into your shop more often.
3.       Customers that don’t have enough $ for rewrites usually lose their loan.
4.       Some stores offer customer holds without payment – Bravo manages customer holds as well, but extensions is an option with payment
5.       Customers love this option, and this drives customers to stores that offer this service.
6.       I would not have believed how much traffic this drives to the stores, but for customers to have the option to pay 10 days of interest for example, to save their loan, they do, and they appreciate it.
7.       This option has been adopted by every publicly traded pawnshop company, albeit not all operate in California.  But they did not adopt this policy to lose money.  Their loan yields increased.
8.       Bravo manages the administrative time lines so that the transaction remains compliant and address the issues you stated.   
9.       Offering an extension to a customer offers fewer potential liabilities and higher customer service satisfaction, than a disgruntled customer losing their item that they really wanted to save.
10.   In the end there is less customer loss,  you keep more customers longer generating more revenues over time.

These are most of the reasons that we know of, and the reasons that we included this feature in Bravo.  Many small stores can’t offer this feature because of the daunting administrative overhead.  Stores that don’t have this feature are losing business across the U.S. to others that offer this service.  Customers benefit and Pawnbrokers make more money.  It’s a nice combo.

Steve

Monday, July 11, 2011

Bravo's compliance to Laws and Regulations is the best in the Industry!

Don’t get bogged down when you have an item confiscated by law enforcement.  It’s a part of business.  Bravo’s systems methodology is the best practice for compliance, carefully reporting accurately each and every item in a rich and consistent format.  We systematically assist in driving down the risk of stolen property.   Better results for Bravo users without any extra effort.  Bravo does the heavy lifting.

We were absolutely reverent on solutions to avoid taking in stolen merchandise.  My point about helping our customers, saying “yes” as much as possible, being understanding and showing respect from my perspective is the ‘badge’ that we wear.  Most of our customers come to us because they have too.  We need to be compassionate.  Its good business and its where we have chosen to be.

So, does this mean to knowingly take in stolen merchandise, of course not.  I don’t believe asking customers questions and suspecting every item as stolen is an effective way to deter taking in stolen merchandise.  I believe it demeans our business and certainly our customers.  And the facts are, we nearly never take in stolen property.  When we find ourselves defending something that rarely happens, and when we try to defend ourselves in an subject where  it’s impossible to completely avoid taking in a stolen item, in a way it makes us look bad.  Yes, “It’s a part of the business”

I am a system guy, so we would look for ways to avoid taking in stolen items.  We would look for “Tells”.  Tells are signals, signs, tip offs.  It would drive me crazy when an outsider would say, “ you should have known it was stolen”.  What does that mean?  But we took that message to task and found several ways to try to monitor activities that might give us a “Tell”, and when this happened we would opt to ask questions, avoid the merchandise, or the customer.  Our goal was a number of transactions (1500) to every police hold.  That was 50% better than the national average.  Our system methodology and processes assisted our employees in achieving the positive result.  We lent as much money as possible with confidence that it was with legitimate people and merchandise.

I think systems driven solution is the most effective way to manage this challenge effectively.  In my last CAPA email I suggested methods that I believe CAPA could assist as well.  Running an compliant business is complying to the laws and regulations that this business requires as a best practice.  For me, being “compliant”, the effort has to be for a score of 100%.

Be compliant, get the transaction completed efficiently and as fast as you can, say yes more often, win customers for longer, have more fun, these are “Tells” of well run business.