TCF Policy

Car Finance R Us

Treating Customers Fairly (TCF) Policy

Version 1.2

Treating Customers Fairly Policy V1.2 18/09/21

We may update our TCF policy at any time

Policy Overview

Treating Customer Fairly (TCF) is a key principle that the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) expects all regulated firms to pay attention to and achieve certain standards. Achieving fair and positive customer outcomes is central to our company culture and approach at Car Finance R Us. We hope that by publishing this policy our customers and partners can clearly see what is important to us as a company.

This policy aims to document our approach to TCF regardless of whether the customer has purchased from us or not.

As a company we aim to ensure that we:

Set the best possible culture that is built around TCF.
Provides a framework that all staff can apply when making decisions that affect customers.
Meet the TCF guidelines and standard set by the FCA and our partners.

Six Consumer Outcomes (FCA)

There are six consumer outcomes that firms like us should achieve in order to ensure the fair treatment of customers.

Outcome 1: Consumers can be confident they are dealing with firms where the fair treatment of customers is central to the corporate culture.
Outcome 2: Products and services marketed and sold in the market are designed to meet the needs of identified consumer groups and are targeted accordingly.
Outcome 3: Consumers are provided with clear information and are kept appropriately informed before, during and after the point of sale.
Outcome 4: Where consumers receive advice, the advice is suitable and takes account of their circumstances.
Outcome 5: Consumers are provided with products that perform as firms have led them to expect, and the associated service is of an acceptable standard and as they have been led to expect.
Outcome 6: Consumers do not face unreasonable post-sale barriers imposed by firms to change product, switch provider, submit a claim or make a complaint.

Company Culture:

We are an agile, forward thinking and innovative business that handles sensitive customer information and as a result it is extremely important that we set a company culture that allows staff to make the right decisions for our customers at all times.

We aspire to create and maintain a TCF focussed culture by:

Leading by example and promoting an ethical approach to decision making.
Recruiting staff that we believe will have the customer at the heart of what they do.
Empowering & training our staff so that they can make the right decisions.
Supporting staff with the right tools and to impart a continuous improvement approach.
Ensuring that our company ethos is understood so that all staff are on the same page.
Promoting that staff should feel confident to flag and raise issues to senior management.
Building a strong and customer focussed management team.
Considering the customer when we set internal targets.
Achieving a positive balance between resource in sales and customer service roles.
Continually training our staff throughout the year to ensure they are at the forefront of regulatory updates and changes.

Customer Experience:

We have a dedicated customer experience manager that focusses on customer feedback and complaints. From a customer feedback perspective we aim to collect as much feedback as possible from our customers.

To achieve this we:

Conduct Internal reviews to track customer feedback and also the likelihood that they would recommend our services. Utilising feedback sites such as Trust Pilot®, FEEFO® and Google®
Invite customer to provide feedback at any stage of the process.
Analyse feedback received and join it with complaints data so that we can continually improve our processes

Customer Complaints

Our customer experience manager is focussed on turning bad outcomes into positive ones. We believe in making it easy for customers to make a complaint as this is an opportunity to learn and put things right.

To achieve this we:

Ensure that our complaints process is clearly sign posted on the footer of each page on our website.
Make it easy for complaints to be submitted online or via any other route such as email, phone or in writing.
Encourage all staff to log every complaint with our complaints department so that we can deal with the issue professionally and to analyse the reason for the complaint.
Employ a designated complaint handler, who is trained to handle complaints professionally where they cannot be resolved at the point of initial contact.
Invest in our complaints training, systems and processes.

Leadership & Management

We are conscious that leadership is critical to ensure we deliver this policy. We have focussed on the following point to ensure we have the right team:

We have an experienced and customer focussed senior management team that believe in the company ethos
We have invested in our organisational structure to ensure that we have the resource to observe, provide feedback and coach within the day-to-day role.
We record telephone calls for the training and monitoring purposes so that we can maintain our high TCF standards.

Quality Control & Governance

We have developed internal systems to support quality control. It is our belief that this function has a direct impact on customer outcomes.
We have strong governance structures that aim to ensure senior managers meet and discuss all of the standards required including those linked to TCF.

‍External Audit

External audit is an important discipline to ensure we get independently reviewed on a regular basis. See the key point below that also assist with treating customers fairly:

We work with our panel of lenders compliance teams to ensure our policies regarding TCF are in line with theirs to main continuity within the brokering of product sales.
We have quarterly reviews of our compliances via external compliance company Simply Biz.
We directly partner with the leading finance companies in the UK and we have to evidence TCF as part of these relationships.

Staff Incentives

We work hard to link staff incentives to great customer outcomes. We do this in our sales incentive scheme by ensuring the following:

Sales staff are rewarded after the vehicle has been delivered rather than at the point of order
Sales staff must hit certain standards linked to TCF in order to achieve an incentive.
Staff are not incentivised to sell one product over another.

Internal Systems

We have developed bespoke areas within our internal system (Auto Convert), that continually get updated, in order to streamline the journey and make communications with the customer as easy as possible.