Canada Drives accelerates success with Salesforce

It handles like a dream and the interior is to die for - congratulations, you’ve found your perfect car! And because you’re a Canada Drives customer, you’ve already had your loan approved and are planning your first road trip.

Canada Drives burst onto the car loans market in 2010 to shake up the industry. “Our mission is to make life easier for the customer,” said Cody Green, Founder and Co-CEO of the company. “Before, people could spend hours picking out their dream car, only to find out their loan was not approved. That’s not just heartbreaking for the buyer, but wastes time for the dealership too.”

The trailblazing car loans company has turned that process on its head to make sure buyers have the funds in place before they set foot on the dealership lot. The loans provider prides itself in delivering a consumer-centric experience. And to create a frictionless journey as it extends its service offerings and expands into new markets, it’s harnessing the power of Salesforce. 

The 400 plus-strong team at Canada Drives recognizes that people want to arrange their car finance online, and is striving to provide a fully digital, simple, and speedy service. “We receive more than a million loan applications every year and have a 9/10 Trustpilot rating,” explained Jose Molitor, Senior Project Manager. “To maintain our reputation for excellent customer service while achieving our goals for growth, we needed a digital platform that will support the whole business.”

Canada Drives started its Salesforce journey in 2011, with Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Community Cloud, and Marketing Cloud now underpinning many of its business processes. “We originally selected Salesforce for its flexibility and scalability, and it hasn’t let us down,” said Jessica Bindisch, Product Manager. “With Salesforce, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel for core capabilities, so you can focus development efforts on what’s going to deliver real competitive advantage.” 

Sales Cloud underpins the sales process from application and qualification to conversion and dealer assignment. “Salesforce helps us to be successful in a hundred small ways,” said Green. “Every step in the sales process happens in Salesforce – from automating verifying email addresses to capturing electronic signatures - helping the team be more productive and handle more sales.”

Sales Cloud also flags customers that haven’t been contacted recently, helping the team prioritize loan applicants who need more attention, and ultimately close more deals. 

As well as serving consumers, Canada Drives strives to ensure the needs of dealerships are met. To keep on track with these partners – which range from single branches to national conglomerates - it’s built a dealer community on Community Cloud. “Via the community, dealerships can view customer data, forecasts, and updates without having to make lengthy calls or send emails,” explained Molitor. “We’ve had great feedback – the dealerships have been really impressed.”

Dealers can also use the community to access training and best practice guides, and submit issues direct to Canada Drives’ service agents via integration with Service Cloud. 

The 20-strong service team uses Service Cloud to manage customer cases. “Before, agents had to toggle between multiple platforms to find the right data,” explained Bindisch. “Now they just use Service Cloud, which makes their jobs much easier.”

As well as making the existing team more efficient, it’s now also easier to onboard new staff, which is vital given the team’s expected growth. With so much data captured in Service Cloud, the management team has also been able to unlock insights into staff performance, common issues, and potential improvements. 

In addition to sales and service, Canada Drives’ marketing team is also leveraging Salesforce to build stronger relationships with its customers. In a highly digitized world where platforms like Facebook, Instagram, email and text are replacing in-person interaction, the company is building trust with customers via Marketing Cloud’s ability to analyze patterns of behaviour. “We’ve built trigger-based journeys in Marketing Cloud that helps us segment customers in order to get the right message to the right person at the right time,” said Bindisch.

“And this is just the start for us,” she continued. “Each customer is different and needs a unique experience to get the most out of their relationship with us. We’ve segmented our customer data using attribution models in order to target the message through the channel they prefer, at the time and cadence they prefer, tailoring to their individual situation.” 

Following these successes, Bindisch and Molitor are now working with Salesforce to harness Einstein Analytics. “We’re starting to build a business intelligence framework to measure how we’re doing and identify areas for improvement,” said Bindisch. “The more processes we integrate into Salesforce, the better the insights we can gain into the business and customers’ needs.”

Using the Salesforce analytics solution has already helped the marketing team optimize its approach to digital advertising. “We’re one of Canada’s largest digital advertisers,” explained Molitor. “Following a Salesforce workshop, we built a dashboard using Einstein Analytics that helps us monitor investments in digital advertising across different provinces. Thanks to the solution, we’ve seen our cost of customer acquisition go down.”

Salesforce’s flexibility is a perfect match for Canada Drives’ dynamic culture. “Salesforce keeps our employees productive, it keeps our partners informed, and means we can help more customers purchase their dream car,” said Green. “As we grow, Salesforce will help us evolve our services so we can continue to meet customer needs.”