What Is Our Value Assessment Statement?
Our Value Assessment Statement is a regulatory document that we produce each year reviewing our performance, charges, advice and overall service to our clients.
In this report, we provide details of how we deliver value, the actions we’ve taken over the past 12 months, and where we can do more.
What We Offer
Wessex Fleet provides vehicle leasing to personal and small business customers throughout the UK. We connect customers with a finance provider to get them a competitive lease for their vehicle.
Our service includes:
- Helping customers to choose a suitable vehicle that meets their needs and requirements.
- Helping customers to understand the contract hire product used to finance their vehicle so that it meets their needs and requirements.
- Helping customers to select the appropriate contract term, annual mileage and maintenance package to suit their needs.
- Explaining the benefits and risks associated with different finance providers’ contract hire products.
- Helping customers secure credit and be approved by a finance provider’s underwriting process.
- Helping customers to complete the required documents associated with their contract hire agreement.
- Sourcing and securing the vehicle from our network of suppliers and dealerships.
- Allowing the customer to access discounts on vehicles negotiated using our purchasing power.
- Ensuring customers find the lowest cost option available to them in the market through our competitive tendering process on our panel of finance providers.
- Access to a dedicated account manager throughout the research and buying process.
- Offering our Customer Services support throughout the life of the contract hire agreement.
- Proactively assisting customers with contract amendments, vehicle collection, contract extension or renewal.
Service Limitations
We only offer contract hire products. Our service only offers Personal and Business Contract Hire agreements, which are designed to provide our customers with flexibility and affordability. While you won’t own the vehicle at the end of the lease, our contracts offer a host of benefits, including lower upfront costs and fixed monthly payments.
Non-Financial Costs
We understand that any new financial commitment can have an impact that extends beyond monetary considerations. Non-financial costs, such as the impact on your time and privacy, should be taken into account.
Regarding your time, searching for a deal, negotiating an agreement, amending a contract, or cancelling an order can all be time-consuming processes that require careful consideration. As a broker, our aim is to alleviate this burden by providing advice, direction, and support throughout the entire leasing journey.
Concerning your data, as a broker, we may collect and use your personal data for purposes such as marketing or to improve our service. This may raise privacy concerns, as your data may be shared with third parties.
However, we alleviate these concerns by ensuring that our use of customer data is limited to fulfilling our service requirements and that marketing literature is only sent with your consent. You can view our privacy policy for more information on how we use your data.
How Do We Support Those with Vulnerabilities?
All of our customer-facing staff are trained to recognise vulnerability in customers and how to support them. Our staff are trained to tailor their approach to meet the customer’s needs so that they experience outcomes as good as other customers and receive consistently fair treatment.
We continually gather feedback from our customers so that we can understand their needs. We regularly review the design of our sales and support services to ensure they continue to meet the needs, characteristics and objectives of our target market, including those customers with characteristics of vulnerability. We design our communications to be clear, fair and not misleading and review them regularly. Where we identify actual or potential harm we take action to address this.
We have various ways of monitoring whether we are meeting the needs of vulnerable customers which include assessing the quality of our interactions with customers, reviewing resolutions to complaints, analysing the root cause of every complaint and monitoring key indicators of harm for different customer types.
How We Assess Value
At Wessex Fleet, we prioritise providing excellent value to our customers. To ensure we meet this goal, we assess our value proposition by evaluating our unique selling points, core values, pricing competitiveness, and service quality.
Over the past two decades, we have established comprehensive processes for reviewing our business performance, pricing strategies, and services for personal and small business leasing customers. With the FCA’s Assessment of Value requirements, we have enhanced these procedures by enforcing greater transparency and rigor to our pre-existing processes.
Our Value Assessment in Practice
Our commitment to delivering value in practice is straightforward: we offer competitive pricing backed by personalised, first-class service. Our dedicated Account Managers work closely with customers to ensure their vehicle requirements are met, from selecting the most suitable vehicle to arranging credit and delivery.
All our sales and support staff undergo thorough induction training before interacting with customers, and their competency is signed off by their line manager.
Additionally, all staff must complete mandatory training modules approved by our industry body, the BVRLA, throughout the year. Customer-facing staff attend quarterly compliance training sessions, covering topics such as Consumer Duty, Vulnerability, Conduct, and Complaints Handling.
To ensure consistent, high-quality service, our management team regularly monitors the performance of our customer-facing staff. Each month, the compliance manager reviews a sample of calls and files to ensure compliance and an excellent customer experience. Our Compliance manager reports the outcomes to our Board.
How We Measure Our Performance
- Price & Value Management Information
- Complaints
- Customer Survey
- FeeFo Review scores
Through our Customer Relationship Management system, we are able to measure many parts of the customer journey. This includes Credit Decline, (both by our funders, and by our own internal procedures), Cancellations, take up rates (where we measure our competitiveness in the marketplace), amongst other data. We have a robust complaints procedure, where any expression of dissatisfaction is logged, reviewed and thorough root cause analysis is carried out.
Our customer survey questionnaire is end to all retail customers at the point their vehicle is delivered. This questionnaire measures our performance against the key Treating Customers Fairly indicators, as well as the Consumer Duty outcomes.
We encourage our customers to give us a review on FeeFo, which gives us another good measure of our effectiveness in customer service.
Fees & Charges
Commission & Remuneration: When you order a vehicle, you will enter into a lease agreement with one of our partner finance providers/lenders. Our arrangement fee is for our services and not for arranging the finance agreement.
The commission we receive from the finance provider/lender maybe pre-set but can vary and will impact the amount payable by you.
We will disclose the commission we receive from the finance company to you prior to the order of the vehicle. This will be at the point we provide you with an official quote. Should the original quote change in any way, such as change of term or mileage allowance, a new quote will be provided, and this will also show the new commission amount. We will ask you to sign each commission disclosure to indicate your informed consent to us receiving this remuneration.
Administration Fee
We charge a fee of £270 including VAT for our services. These services include:
- Helping you to find a suitable vehicle that meets your needs and requirements.
- Helping you to understand the contract hire product used to finance your vehicle so that it meets your needs and requirements.
- Helping you to select the appropriate contract term, annual mileage and maintenance package to suit your needs.
- Searching the market to find you a competitive price
- Sourcing and securing your vehicle from our network of suppliers and dealerships.
- Offering our Customer Services support throughout the life of your lease.
- Proactively assisting you with contract amendments, vehicle collection, contract extension or renewal.
- The administration fee is charged to cover the administration of the sales and support service and the ongoing provision of the best available lease rates through our website. It is not for introducing you to a funder or for any part of the service which is covered by the commission. This fee is one of the most competitive administration fees in the market.
Here at Wessex Fleet we believe in offering outstanding customer service and great value for money. We also believe that by putting the customer at the core of everything we do, we meet and exceed those expectations.