Launch Facepay for Full Throttle Profits

Success came from choosing the right copilots in shop owners Greg Buckley and Eric Sevim, two of many who helped create an award-winning product and service for its time. Owners and service writers helped make Demandforce an unmitigated success and the same mentality drives the development of Facepay. For his part, Westerlund is a trusted leader in the auto industry because he works hard for shops; he became CEO of Kukui, the next evolution of marketing automation, and his cross-country tour in the Kukui shrink wrapped van is legendary and got him in touch with shop owners nationwide.

Hale is a respected Silicon Valley veteran. His background is in high performance super-computing for NASA, where he worked on next-gen aircraft such as the F22 and F35 (Hale is also a licensed pilot and enjoys being a pilot owner of an L39 fighter jet). Hale built out the Demandforce platform and was part of Intuit after its acquisition. 

Facepay came next.

Facepay Mission Brief

Hale was flying at an airshow at Nellis AFB, Las Vegas. The Fighter Weapons School is the “Top Gun” of the Air Force and it was a privilege for Hale to fly with the best of the best that week. During this time, the annual Money 20/20 expo was in town. Hale’s previous computing work was a precursor to blockchain technology (cryptocurrency), a hot topic at the expo where keynote speaker David Nelms, CEO of Discover, went on record saying, “there is nothing innovative coming in this space.” This was Hale’s AHA! moment—why do we even need credit cards, discount credit card processors and their associated fees? 

Hale spent years figuring out the technology to disrupt the exploitative credit card industry. From this work came Facepay, the pivotal relational payments platform. The elegance of Facepay lies in its simplicity: Facepay works in your existing workflow to convert customers to direct payments, eliminating the middleman (credit card processors) and blasting their fees away. And customers are doing it every day—imagine if 30 percent of your customers paid you the equivalent of cash without having to change your process or any management system software your service writers use. 

Facepay is a true market disrupter by converting credit card processing fees (and any ancillary fees) to a fixed subscription price. No established processor can do this without putting themselves out of business. Our team works in the interest of shops and that is why we are endorsed by many coaches, vendors and associations.

Taking Flight - How Facepay Works

The minds behind Facepay like to think of the Facepay dashboard as being built by service writers for service writers. As a result Facepay is used at hundreds of shops and growing fast.

Q: So how does Facepay help pilot the process to success? 

A: By allowing service writers to directly contribute to the bottom line without requiring additional work. 

Service writers accept payment when the vehicle service is complete. Customers have already authorized payments while the work is being performed.  This step may be called vehicle ready, pickup, checkout. It is when they accept payment from the customer with Facepay with the click of a button and they eliminate all the credit card steps, card not present fees and many issues and potential chargebacks with credit cards. Facepay has same-day clearing. Our focus is on ease of use for service writers and their customers.

Facepay works so well that the average repair order taken through it is $943, or roughly $25 direct profit paid in processing fees each time you skip the credit card machine.

“All you do with our dashboard is accept payment from the customer; so easy to use,” Hale says, “it’s the most anti-climactic, three-second demo imaginable! But it saves big dollars. Service writers are the real heroes.”

Implementing Facepay is simple:

• Service writers at our shops get a software dashboard for behind the counter to accept payment at Checkout
• Facepay does the work of automating customer notifications at Check-In (or vehicle drop off, estimate, depending on your process)
• Customers sign up while their vehicle is being serviced

“And that’s it,” Hale says. 

Hale says that Facepay works so well because customers already trust their shop, and who like and trust DVI and automation. It’s not a conceptual leap to sign up, and unlike Venmo or other third-party apps, there’s no barrier to entry and shop customers don’t download anything; they merely connect their bank account in a secure process. Hale points out that more than 72 percent of customers report desiring a simpler digital process for transactions, and that this past year was transformational. Customers now prioritize this digital ease-of-use preference to local businesses.

Switching to Autopilot with Facepay

Dr. Hale and the Facepay team learned at Demandforce that once a customer starts going digital through emails, appointments, reminders, reviews, etc., they want to stay digital. Simplifying the communication, approval, repair and payment processes has proven to drive customer loyalty and raise revenue.

Debrief

Your shop can make more profits by taking the simple step of accepting payments from your customers with Facepay. Facepay handles the conversion and takes just a few moments to get started. Facepay is designed to work within your existing workflow and systems. Auto shops that do it are soaring to new heights of revenue, CSR scores and customer satisfaction.

Go on. Be a Maverick.