Bite-Sized Training for F&I Professionals

Personalization is the new buzzword in the dealership world, not just in the customer experience but also, it seems, in employee training.

JM&A Group has invested in a startup that allows dealership employees to access bite-sized bits of F&I training videos personalized for not only each dealership but also each dealership employee. That is the first step to a better customer experience, say industry players.

“You can focus if you want on the consumer, but if your dealership associates aren’t trained in a personalized manner, they aren’t going to be able to meet consumer expectations,” Kevin Hull, director of strategic planning at JM&A Group, tells WardsAuto.

The Group has taken a minority share in The RockED Company, which bills itself as a “next-generation mobile learning platform” offering daily doses of short-form video content. Think of it as a version of TikTok composed entirely of dealership training videos.

“We think this is the next frontier of how dealers will learn and train their associates,” says Hull.

Short bursts of information are the best way to reach the 2 million people born after 1980 and now working in the automotive sector, says Marco Schnabl, founder and executive chairman of RockED.

“They consume information very differently,” says Schnabl, who also founded automotiveMastermind.

RockED has a library of over 2,000 videos. It adds around 250 videos every quarter and replaces those which are no longer timely, says Schnabl.

It aims to address current questions, so, for example, inventory shortage was a hot topic last year. This year, rising interest rates are in. Dealership clients pay an average of $795 a month for the service, says Schnabl.

Clients access the videos via a mobile phone app.

Using the dealership data of JM&A, a subsidiary of JM Family Enterprises, RockED builds a library of content for each dealership client. The content is personalized at the dealership and employee level and is “only relative to the individual learner versus the whole store or brand,” says Schnabl.

JM&A subscribes to what Hull calls the adult learning science of 10-20-70 which says you learn 10% of your knowledge through classroom instruction; 20% from observing, learning, and coaching (in this case by JM&A associates); and 70% through actual experience.

RockED’s short videos allow JM&A to tap into the 70% component, offering an enhanced value proposition, says Hull.

“It plays a role in how people learn today, through bite-sized information you take action on, learn, then reinforce,” he says.