Leader Spotlight: Creating a loyalty machine, with Rachna Sethi

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Rachna Sethi is VP of Product at Ford Credit, the financial services arm of Ford Motor Company. Coming from a background in scientific research, Rachna transitioned into product management while working at Nextel (now T-Mobile) early in her career. She then served in various product and leadership roles at tech companies like AOL, Spark Networks, Meta (Facebook), and Syniverse before joining Ford Credit in 2021.

In our conversation, Rachna talks about her team’s focus and effort to constantly improve the vehicle-buying process. She explains the different user groups of Ford Credit — consumers, commercial, and dealerships — and the “true partnership” required for a successful, integrated system. Rachna also shares the process of digging into 60 years’ worth of data and extracting insights to make product decisions for the future.

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Digital transformation and moving toward mobile

Can you start by telling us about what Ford Credit does and your role there?

I am VP of Product at Ford Credit. The Ford Credit entity is part of the overall Ford Motor Company. Ford Credit is the fintech arm at Ford that enables vehicle sales, leases, and other software services. I’m part of the product organization at Ford Credit that obsesses over online, software-related products while keeping our offline customer experiences in mind.

At Ford Credit, we have three major users: consumers (everyday people who purchase, retail finance, or lease a car), commercial or business customers (who have fleets and multiple accounts), and our dealers. I’m responsible for various digital experiences for all three user groups and the digital platform that these experiences are built on.

Ford Credit is going through a huge digital transformation. Could you talk about that?

The mission of Ford Credit is to be a loyalty machine and the reason for customers to choose Ford. A lot of our focus is on building loyalty among the customers we interact with every month because they’re making payments in our system for the vehicles that they’ve purchased or leased. In the future, as the enterprise sells more software products such as BlueCruise, we will attract different users.

Our digital transformation journey means moving into new technology stacks for certain core software and systems, and will allow us more flexibility for our future ambitions. This modernization effort is a big digital transformation that is also making us look at improving processes at the same time. We are always trying to figure out our advantages and offer differentiated products and experiences compared to the rest of the market in terms of financing for vehicles, software, and other accessories. That’s the overall goal and mission.

Differentiating the car-buying process

As you’re investing more into mobile applications as a fintech arm of Ford, how have you navigated and determined your product-market fit?

We’re really well-positioned in many ways. We’re connected into Ford, so we understand our forecasting, inventory, pipelining, and all of those areas. The company itself is 120 years old but our credit side is about 60-plus years old. So we’re very unique in the way that we have provided financing for these 60 years. We understand our customers really well and what it takes to weather every single financial volatility.

What is Ford Credit looking toward in 2024 to differentiate itself in a very saturated auto market?

Vehicle financing is what we do for a living. We’re experts at it and we help people through difficult times. Many of our competitors don’t share that philosophy. Ford Credit has built a business that gives consistent support to our customers through economic cycles. We are working every day to create great digital experiences to make it easier to work with us. For example, as the consumer base for electric vehicles (EVs) expands, we are investing in creating the right digital products and services. We are working to give all our customers the option to self-serve digitally if they want to but still provide world-class customer service where and when they need it.

The second area is saving consumers time. One of the biggest pain points going into a dealership to purchase a car is often the financial office and the time it takes to get through that process. We launched a prequalification tool so that consumers can see what they qualify for before they sit down in a dealership office. We’re looking at how to take this tool completely mobile and make it seamless with the dealership and consumers themselves. Similarly, for our commercial customers, we’re looking into how we can allow them to add a vehicle to their fleet without having to go through an application over again.

The last thing is how we can expand the benefits of being a Ford customer. There are so many different ways we can go at this stage. If you purchase through Ford Credit, what benefits can you get? What loyalty points, programs, or incentives can we potentially put you into? We’ve noticed through our own data that the people who purchase through Ford Credit are generally much more engaged. They have higher loyalty to the brand and dealers. There’s a correlation there, and we’re looking to explore that even further to identify benefits we can tie this into.

Making decisions from 60 years of data

What methods are you using at Ford Credit to understand the customer experience or dealership experience?

We use all kinds of online tools, but we use a lot of in-person methods to get feedback too. We have a phenomenal UX and research team. They go through research and do personas, interviews, and focus groups. Within our own builds, we look at things like mouse flow, user testing, and our data. We experiment on the experiences to constantly improve. We have dealer councils that do sessions with us to provide feedback on things we’re thinking of doing.

Dealers are great resources. They understand these customers inside out. They can tell you very quickly what works, what doesn’t work, why it works, and how a customer will react to things.

Ford Credit has 60 years of quantitative data, so how do you find what’s important and cross-reference the data to create goals based on that?

The amount of data we do have is amazing. At the same time, from a modern data perspective, we have just begun our journey to try to stitch certain pieces of data together. We’re trying to further data-driven offers and communications with our customers and touchpoints. We’re exploring use and leverage of AI in many parts of the business to improve user experiences — plus it helps to have heaps of data.

Creating modern solutions for old processes

You mentioned loyalty — that seems to be a big factor when choosing a car or car brand. How are you tracking loyalty specifically?

We’ve modeled it, starting at the Ford level and moving all the way down to Ford Credit in terms of customer lifetime value. We strategically look at value optimization for services and products through these models.

More specifically, with leases, we look at renewal rates as well. With leases, after two or three years, you’re going to come back and get a different car for sure. Renewal rates on the leases are really important in terms of loyalty.

Similarly to loyalty, I imagine that the regularity with which a customer checks the Ford Credit app varies. What’s your mindset around building for that user who doesn’t have frequent touchpoints?

This is actually a question we’ve been asking ourselves. This is where I mentioned we are figuring out the benefits of being a Ford customer, what that means, and how we can extend those benefits. Maybe part of it is interesting content or practical information that’s related to the customer’s car.

We just started to give our customers a way to login and pay on their phones by launching our mobile app. For a lot of people, the vehicle payment is one of their biggest monthly payments. Sometimes, people need to not put it on autopay but schedule it when they want to. The mobile phone is pretty important for them to be able to do that quickly.

On the other hand, commercial customers have multiple vehicles and they’re managing fleets. It’s a very different use case. They have telematics that they have purchased, which is part of our software for commercial customers.

The team is always exploring how to make services at a dealership easier. If something goes wrong, how can we make it easier for the user to schedule it or pick it up? Or the ability to do an inspection on your phone ahead of time? Those are all reasons to use your phone for things like that. Now, we’re looking at other benefits in terms of products, loyalty points, etc.

A true partnership between user groups

You interact with many stakeholders, including consumers and dealerships, as you just mentioned. What approaches do you use to manage all of these different groups?

I would say with the dealers, it’s a true partnership in many ways. I have a global team, and the US is different from Europe, for example, in the way that things are dealt with. Because of that, it has to be a partnership.

For example, in the US, we have a wholesale relationship with dealers — a full planning relationship. They need tools to be able to quickly track and optimize what they are doing with us versus with other banks and financial institutions. It benefits all parties to have great, user-friendly experiences.

We’ve created new digital journeys that enable dealers to quickly access their own business information and the benefits of working with us. The dealer’s success is our success.

I know in recent years, especially around COVID, there have been issues with the supply chain. How do you handle the times when things are out of your control?

Ford Credit has the wherewithal to weather all of that. It goes back to the experience and our consistency in changing market conditions. To use your example of COVID, we launched a national disaster relief plan for affected customers. Nearly all of those customers caught up on their payments to us before the end of the year.

Ford Credit has exceptional modeling, which allows us to manage risks well while maintaining consistent lending practices that support customers across the credit spectrum.

How computers function like a brain

Early in your career, you worked in scientific research. Can you speak to how your background and research have influenced your approach to product management?

I’ll attribute it to a couple of things. When you have a scientific sort of background, you’ve learned and applied skills in critical thinking, hypothesizing, experimentation, data analysis, and impact analysis, and you’ve told the story of how it all connects to benefit people. All of those skills are very critical and directly applicable in product management. Personally, I can visualize and think ahead in terms of what I’m doing and what the result may be.

Very early in my career, I had a mentor who laid out my skill set against what happens in a business environment. At that time, I was in a product analyst or data analyst position. Very quickly, I realized, “I can do these things. These are not cells, they are users. It’s not that different.” I loved the aspect of melding this thinking with design, business, and engineering. I have a neurobiology and physiology degree, and when I look at computer neural networks and AI, it is a no-brainer that this is modeled after the way neural networks in the brain work for human intelligence.

There are a lot of connections in computer science to neurobiology if you look at it the right way. At University of Maryland, the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences under one umbrella embodies STEM but also leverages each area with the other.

When we talked offline, you mentioned that you strive for the word ‘delightful’ in your work. Can you talk about what this means and how a product becomes delightful?

To me, a product is delightful when a user doesn’t have to think too much about what they’re doing and they enjoy using the product. You’re removing the friction and providing a user experience that is delightful, pleasing and best-in-class. That’s really what it means to me. There’s so much that needs to go into it, like usability, visual design, function, for it to be delightful. Every time I see or use something new, I’m either delighted by it or I’m not. If it doesn’t evoke joy or delight, it’s just an OK product.