Company: EFG Companies
Company Description: For more than 45 years, EFG Companies has provided consumer protection programs for vehicles and residences across seven market channels. The company’s strategic intent is to build sustainable market differentiation and profitability for its clients and partners, including dealers, lenders, manufacturers, independent marketers and agents.
Nomination Category: Solution Provider Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Leadership or Management Training Practice of the Year
 Nomination Title: Herding Cats on a Timeline
- Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes, explaining the achievements since July 1, 2020 of the nominated organization, OR written answers to the questions? (Choose one):
Written answers to the questions
- If you are submitting a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, provide the URL of the video here, OR attach it to your entry via the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above, through which you may also upload a copy of your video. If you are submitting written answers to the questions for this category, provide them in the spaces below.
- Briefly describe the nominated organization: its history and past performance (up to 200 words):
Total 199 words used.
For more than 45 years, EFG Companies has provided national consumer protection programs for vehicles and residences across seven market channels, including retail automotive, lenders, manufacturers, independent marketers, and agents. The company’s strategic intent is to build sustainable market differentiation and profitability for its clients. EFG’s award-winning engagement model is built upon the belief that the company serves as an extension of its clients’ management teams, providing ongoing F&I development, training, product innovation, compliance, and nationally recognized product administration.
EFG’S reputation is built upon its industry-leading client engagement model, which includes regular onsite support for everything from sales, finance, and service training to reinsurance reporting. That on-site support is reinforced by EFG’s operations team that provides quality customer service, award-winning claims adjudication, and compliant technology integration through its Platform Development group. In EFG’s engagement model, account representatives serve in a dual-role capacity: business development and acquisitions, and client servicing.
Additionally, EFG’s operations team comes to work every day with the mindset of fostering organic and new growth by consistently seeking new processes and technology to drive efficiency and differentiation. Their high achievement in the area of customer service is backed by national customer service awards and recognition each year.
- Outline the organization's achievements since July 1 2020 that you wish to bring to the judges' attention (up to 250 words):
Total 248 words used.
June 3, 2022, J.D. Power announced the acquisition of an automobile software company, Tail Light. For automotive dealerships, this meant they must identify a suitable automotive sales platform replacement by either transitioning to J.D. Power’s Darwin platform or finding another option in just 5 months. This was a critically tight timeframe, as without a retailing platform they could not sell and finance vehicles.
EFG’s Platform Development team put an aggressive transition plan in place to equip our field team so they could facilitate our clients making this significant transition with no business interruption. Almost 30% of EFG’s clients were impacted.
- Our Platform team immediately established formal communications and bi-weekly meetings with Darwin to ensure proper governance of the process from their side, as well as an open channel for efficiency in responses to question, needs, etc. These calls included Platform Development, Darwin, EFG’s account executives, and clients.
- To augment those communications, the Platform Development team implemented a monthly email and text communication campaign, including a count-down clock, to keep our clients on top of important transition deadlines and next steps.
- For those clients that chose to move to Darwin, EFG facilitated onboarding training with Darwin, which included:
- The platform itself and how to manage it
- Outlining the process of creating and remitting a contract
- Pricing and DMS information
The result of this training effort was the successful transition of all impacted EFG clients to new platforms by the extended December 31 deadline with no business interruption.
- Explain why the achievements you have highlighted are unique or significant. If possible compare the achievements to the performance of other players in your industry and/or to the organization's past performance (up to 250 words):
Total 203 words used.
The retail automotive industry is one of slow change, with notable pockets of change resistance. A great example of this is the recent extension of the Federal Trade Commission’s effective date for its amendments to the Safeguard Rule. These amendments require dealers to implement substantive information security requirements to protect their customer data. These basic requirements include ongoing risk assessments, testing and monitoring, implementing policies and procedures, etc. Most other industries have already implemented these through formal regulation. In characteristic form, dealerships waited so long that after giving them a full 12 months to implement the requirements, the FTC had to give them an additional six months to ready their businesses.
In comparison, the J.D. Power announcement of the acquisition and 5-month sunsetting timeline for Tail Light was ambitious to say the least. And, as expected, there was panic and chaos in November and December in the industry as a significant number of dealerships had not started the transition process and were at risk for considerable loss of business. Not one of EFG’s clients were among them.
By taking a proactive, training-based approach, EFG successfully migrated all impacted clients to new platforms with no downtime, no lost business, and no lost revenue.
- Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):
Total 43 words used.
The attachments include the transition plan and checklist excel sheet provided to the account executives for them to reference and track their progress. We also included the transition campaign emails and texts, which were sent to the account executives from July through December.
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