As early pioneers of the extended warranty market, we've designed a market-defining product and a highly effective sales process. We consider the customer's entire lifetime value when pricing and managing our warranty book. It's why we deliver such high levels of customer satisfaction.
Warranty
While Intelligent Motoring is very much a joined-up set of aftermarket solutions, warranties in many ways represent the corner stone around which our business has grown.
Our founder, Duncan McClure Fisher, was an early pioneer in defining direct to consumer (D2C) extended warranties in the 1990s. Prior to that date, a car warranty was a product offered by car manufacturers and dealerships when purchasing a new or second-hand car. Once that warranty had expired, the customer was essentially left to fend for themselves, picking up the tab on any unexpected repair bills.
Over the years our warranties and the process by which we sell them and manage claims have grown in sophistication and their level of customer service. From blown engines on luxury vehicles, to failed electrical components on the latest electric vehicles, we’ve managed every type of claim. In fact, our reliability index, which manages the rate of claims and their associated repair costs on vehicles under cover, now represents over 200,000 years-worth of data.
What sets our warranties apart
There are several factors that, when combined, ensure the quality of our warranties set the standard amongst our competitors. Collectively they’ve helped to secure a market leading Trustpilot score when measured in terms of their high volume of positive ratings, but perhaps more tellingly, on the comparatively low percentage of poor ratings. The factors that help differentiate our warranty products from the rest of the market include:
- Price and level of cover – we believe our products offer the best combination of cover level and value for money on the market. Our ability to price our risk is a product of our direct access to labour rates, typical repairs costs and working processes, through the SMR side of our business. Through our Workshop Trading Platform, we can easily spot the occasional over inflated repair bill, bringing it back into line with an acceptable market average.
- Flexibility of product – we offer six different Plan options tailored to a customer’s risk appetite and budget, as well as the age of their vehicle. We also allow customers to flex product pricing by adding or removing an excess fee and/or choosing to vary labour costs.
- Ability to control margin – because we look at the lifetime value of each customer, we’re not driven by the singular motive to extract value on each warranty sale. We consider the bigger picture, a more nuanced opportunity to capture value and the occasional loss-leader by cross-selling our SMR, insurance services and partner products.
- Online / offline conversion – we know warranties can be a complex product to compare side-by-side across providers. That’s why we manage online sales in sync with our Contact Centre and CRM processes. Very often it’s the supportive and advisory words of a human voice that can help navigate a decision.
- Fast decisions – our network of 10,000 garage partners as well as a separate team of independent claim assessors, helps us to secure a speedy resolution or verdict on virtually all types of repairs including fraudulent claims relating to pre-existing faults. Spotting a genuine from a dishonest claims helps us to manage our risk while conforming to the exacting requirements of the Motor Ombudsman and broader industry regulations around customer duty.
- Contact Centre effectiveness – our frontline staff benefit from regular training and the very latest call centre technology. We can proactively respond to customer enquiries, grading each lead and routing them through Dialler technology to the best qualified product expert. The system includes pre-loaded scripts optimised over years of call listening. Callbacks can also be diarised through automated processes to fit-in around a customer’s day.
- Value add – our digital garage is packed with additional features to help a customer manage their vehicle, amongst these, an easy online process for submitting a claim 24/7, 365-days a year.
- Customer service – if you read our Trustpilot ratings, it’s very often the individual members of our sales and repairs teams that are name-checked for their ability to explain product features or the way in which they managed a garage repair.
Each of the above has been optimised over more than 25-years of continual improvement. It’s a focus guided by excellence and fair-value customer service.
Insured and Uninsured flexibility
One additional and noteworthy advantage we have over many of our rivals, is our ability to offer our business partners the option of an insured warranty, or an uninsured product backed by a “captive fund”.
Captive funds are the usual way car manufacturers run their own warranty schemes, but are usually not the norm for the templated approach adopted by most extended warranty providers.
The chief advantage of a captive fund is its ability to offer more nuanced decisions, including “goodwill” payouts on claims that might be borderline or automatically rejected by most other providers. It’s a degree of flexibility that helps us deal with customers on a more individual basis, recognising their lifetime value across their entire vehicle-owing lifecycle.