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Lex Vehicle leasing is the UK’s leading contract hire company with around 40 years experience in providing award winning, bespoke fleet solutions. From its three sites in Cheadle, Stirling in Scotland and Marlow, the company provides an extensive range of lease and contract services including vehicle finance, fleet management, interactive fleet management, outsourcing, van leasing, and car and van rental. The company offers a truly award winning service, this year it was voted the Best Outsourced Service Provider at the Taylor Woodrow Supplier Awards, and won the National Customer Service Team of the Year Award.
Director of business improvement and HR Antonia Pickles, who has been with the company for ten years, explains: “Lex Vehicle Leasing is primarily a vehicle leasing company and its main service is contract hire. The company has been in existence for a long time, and until very recently has expanded purely through organic growth which is quite unique in this industry. We currently employ around 700 people across our three sites, roughly 600 in Cheadle and the rest in our offices in Stirling and Marlow. Our services mean that our customers buy the financing from us, the actual product is the car or van, but the advantage to them is that we take on the risk on the financing for the vehicles for them.”
Lex has recently secured a number of major contracts that will strengthen its position considerably in the market: “We have recently won a contract for the Ford Business Partners business, and even more recently, have secured a significant contract with HSBC, in which they have outsourced their fleet to us, this will hopefully see our company grow by around a third,” Antonia continues. “The HSBC contract will take our total fleet up to around 168,000 vehicles and will mean that we are the biggest company in the industry. They have outsourced the management of their fleet to us. They still maintain the sales and marketing element, and the main customer contact and selling but we essentially provide all of the back office support. For example, if the customer takes the lease for the car we purchase it, deliver it and do all of the maintenance throughout the licence contract and then we sell it at the end. We simply provide all of the support system functions for the contract, it is still an HSBC product and we remain in the background. It will have huge advantages for us, it will create a different distribution channel, is a different way to market us and will help us optimise our performance in the support function.”
Together with its major contracts Lex provides its services to a vast range of customers: “We segment our customer base,” says Antonia. “Our largest customers such as HSBC, The Ministry of Defence and Siemens are in our corporate segment and have very big fleets that we manage. We then have a core channel, which are fleets ranging from 20 vehicles to 500, in this sector we have around 1500 customers. We also have a smaller channel, Lex Vehicle Partners, where we sell through brokers working in partnership with them, and we have an internet based segment called Lex Free Choice that sells to individuals. In all of these segments we have white label customers such as Ford, Honda and HSBC.”
Among Lex’s extensive range of leasing options is a vehicle financing system that allows customers to choose the finance option best suited to their requirements. These include Contract Hire for companies that do not want the financial risk of running their own fleets, Contract Purchase- ideal for companies who cannot fully reclaim VAT, and Lex Freechoice, a personal contract purchase package for hassle free motoring. Running alongside the chosen finance option is the company’s Fleet Management package. This service includes vehicle acquisition, driver assistance and breakdown cover throughout the UK, continuous vehicle servicing and maintenance, fuel management by a Lex Fuelcard and extensive business team support.
Lex Contract Management combines the key service features of contract hire and fleet management and is designed for companies wishing to retain vehicle ownership while paying a fixed monthly cost for servicing and maintenance. Lex will buy vehicles on behalf of a customer and manage the maintenance element of the contracts, at the end of the contract the customer has the option to transfer each vehicle to Lex for a prearranged second hand value. This system benefits the customer in a number of ways including the fleet management and purchasing resources of Lex Vehicle Leasing, Lex maintains cost control while providing a full administrative and accounting service, and by paying a fixed monthly rate the customer is not subjected to the variable running costs associated with owning vehicles.
Customer Service
Antonia believes that in all of Lex’s operations it is vital to maintain very high standards of customer service, and to cultivate a close working relationship: “We work with our customers on many levels. For example, in the corporate arena a lot of our business is based on regular contact with customers. This can include contact with the driver of the particular vehicle, an operational fleet manager or a strategic decision maker at the very top of the business. We have established points of contact with all of our customers that we use regularly, and we like to work in a joint approach with the customer.”
As a consequence of these demands the company has introduced its ‘Lex Momentum’ service, a customer consulting system to give clients optimum performance and efficiency: “The Lex Momentum Service was launched around two years ago, and is essentially a consultancy and advice service that we offer largely to corporate customers, although we are looking at expanding it to our smaller customers in the future,” says Antonia. “We have found, through our customer research in the last two or three years that our clients are becoming increasingly demanding in the amount of help that they want. They want our advice and consultation to help them run their car fleet and our Momentum team are specialists in all of these areas.
“The Momentum Service can take many different forms,” she continues. “It can be a full review of a company’s fleet policy, their whole company car policy or we can recommend a general structure as we have specialists in HR, tax and finance. The team will go in with the customer, depending on the level of involvement that they want from us, and will offer complete advice on how they should structure their fleet and how they should use our contract hire or different products to their benefit. We started this predominantly in our corporate sector and it proved very successful so we are moving it to our core sector for a larger number of customers. It is a process that has to be constantly upgraded and is very much driven by the fact that customer needs are always changing.”
In order to maintain such high levels of customer service Lex places much emphasis on staff education and training. As a consequence, the company has created its own training academy to implement continual staff development. The Academy comprises of four stages with new employees entering the business at level one and graduating through the different levels of knowledge and skills. Subjects at the academy include commercial understanding, presentation skills, knowledge of Lex products and services, sales orientation, time management and communication skills.
“The Academy began in sales as a structured programme of all the requirements needed at different levels,” comments Antonia. “Each job role has its own prescribed academy levels and its own skills and competencies required for the area. It has been a big success in sales and we are now putting it into other areas such as our call centre and credit control department. We have been able to prove statistically that people who have progressed through the levels of the academy have a better sales performance, so provided we have the definition in all of the schemes we are confident it will improve our overall performance.”
Lex’s outstanding performance, excellent customer service and extensive range of leasing services has won recognition within the industry, including a number of high-profile awards: “The most recent award is the National Customer Service Team of the Year Award, that one of our service teams has won,” says Antonia. “We have a number of these teams around the business who work in a very similar way, but it is a great accolade for the team that has won it. It is an excellent example of the fine teamwork that all of the teams demonstrate. Predominantly, I think it comes down to the attitude and approach that the individuals in the team take, most customers want to speak to a regular contact no matter what the problem is. All of our staff try to get to know the customer and to understand their individual needs.”
Despite Lex’s leading position Antonia admits that the current state of the market will continue to present it with challenges: “The market is extremely competitive at present. There is a large cluster of companies that are hugely differentiated, but we still like to think of ourselves as the best and want to continue to demonstrate this. As a consequence, the major short-term challenges that we face are to develop the contracts that we have won recently, to make them a success and to capitalise on them as much as possible. We always need to keep in touch with the needs of the customers, they don’t change dramatically but we need to be aware that they are changing.”
Leading Position
However, she is confident that the current position of the company, together with its, highly trained, dedicated workforce and award winning reputation, can help it retain its leading position in the leasing and contract hire industry: “The position we are in now is excellent. The HSBC deal was reported as being a groundbreaking development but we have done similar things with Ford, the fact that we had already demonstrated our capability was something that helped us win the contract. The first thing that we need to do is to put this in place and make sure that we can make it a success, but there is nothing to stop us in the future for looking for more similar contracts to continually grow.
However, we also understand that expanding the same way is not the only route for us. As a business we are in a very competitive industry and it is vital to be creative to stay ahead. This is something that we have succeeded in so far but you can never be complacent, consequently we are always looking for new opportunities as to how we can improve our service to our customers, and looking for different types of customers and products that we can introduce. There are a lot of good players in the market but we are doing well, we have a very good performance and we are one of the few in the industry who are doing anything different, which puts us in a good position. We really just want to keep ahead of the game, the new contracts are a huge challenge for us but we have done a lot of planning and we feel we can continue to do very well.”
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