Mercedes Benz Financial Services (MBFS): Incompetence Personified

I just wanted to vent a little and share some info for people who may have the misfortune of having to deal with MBFS. I have a lease ending in 3 months. Last week I signed a new lease on a Chevy Bolt (which I love so far!). Part of the reason I jumped on the deal was because I was able to get a good price on a buyout of the Mercedes thanks to the hot used car market. I had pretty similar offers from Vroom, Rodo, and Carvana. Went with Rodo because they seemed the most on the ball in terms of communications.

So, they just needed MBFS to send a dealer payoff quote to them. No big deal, right? Wrong. First, every time you call MBFS, there is a 20 minute wait to speak to someone. Then, when you request the payoff quote, it takes them up to 4 business days to email it, which seems excessive but whatever. So, I wait 4 days and finally get the email…and they sent the wrong quote. They sent the private quote, not the dealer quote. So, another 20 min. on the phone and they say I have to wait another 4 business days to get it sent. 4 days go by and I get a call from MBFS, telling me they can’t send me the quote because I’m not a dealer. They of course didn’t think of this when I was on the phone with them and waited 4 days to inform me. Fine, so I have to call again (20 min wait), give them the fax and email of Rodo and they promise be it’ll be rushed and sent within the hour. Of course, that doesn’t happen. So, I have to call AGAIN (20 min wait) and the rep says they cant send it to me because I’m not a dealer. Yes, that’s right, he doesn’t even see that I’ve already been thru that BS. I ask for supervisor 3 times to no avail (they’re all busy). I finally get a “subject matter expert” on the line and she says the fax was just sent, only after I called and yelled at them. Rodo confirms it’s the correct form.

Anyways, just know if you have to deal with MBFS, be prepared for headaches, incompetenece, and hours of wasted time. Totally soured me on ever buying another Mercedes. Rant over lol.

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lol, I feel your pain. However, I don’t think it’s limited to just MBFS. Nowadays, any time there’s anything remotely non-standard required of customer service in general, you need to spend a ton of energy chasing people to get your desired result. I’m going through this with a couple companies right now (both non-auto related).

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So true. Can’t remember the last time I had a truly positive CS experience in any field.

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When it happens, it’s a big shock to me. I have just come to expect sub-standard service as the norm

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4 posts were merged into an existing topic: Off Topic Landfill 3

I’m just about at the end of anything to do with my old 2017 lease. I agree with your opinion with MBFS. I’m more mentally prepared now to expect sub par service and anything decent is going to be rated as “good” in today’s times. Since I returned my 2017, I had $4000 in security deposits with MBFS that I needed to be returned. It was just a huge headache of multiple calls (think 8-10) with multiple agents where you had to repeat usually the same story you told the previous agent. You never spoke to the same one every time you called. I had one agent tell me they would “get back to me” which they never did. No surprise there. I had other ones put me on hold only to tell me that it was taken care of, and to no shock, it wasn’t addressed and I had to reiterate it to the next guy.

My main issue was that I was double billed for my last payment that was suppose to be waived. The computer didn’t know this so it deducted twice. First time on the MSD then a second time through auto-pay. A few calls got some money returned, and finally today I followed up and my last of the money in a form of a check is going to arrive this week. The weird thing was that some of the money was returned via bank transfer to my checking account but the main amount was via check and it had to go through their accounting department.

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Oh man. I will have MSDs due to me as well once sale goes thru. Now I’m already dreading it lol.

I am curious - can’t you get the payoff from mbfs.com and send that to Rodo? I just tried it and get I get the payoff quote from mbfs.com immediately.

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No, that’s the personal payoff quote. The dealer quote is different.

I didn’t know there are separate “quotes”. Is this for non-MB dealer?

When I traded in my old Mercedes (also a lease) a year early, I logged in to mbfs.com at the MB dealership and show them the payoff quote and they took it.

Maybe so. The personal quote takes the MSDs off the price but the dealer quote includes it. So since I’m selling to Rodo they pay MBFS the full amount and then MBFS returns my MSDs to me in a separate transaction.

‘The Best Or Nothing’ sure has been diluted.

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Ah, good to know! I never put MSD and sell to Rodo (or other 3rd party seller like them), so now I know.

You could have just gone to a dealer and have a manager print one out for you. The incompetence is on Rodo not MBFS. It’s their job to call for payoff not yours. Sounds like Rodo are the amateurs for not having a process to call for payoff.

It’s also not up to MBFS to educate you. They probably assumed that you were a dealer buying out the car so it was probably your lack of clarity. The dealer gets a much lower payoff than a private purchase or another store would. You could have negotiated a buy out at a Benz store for much less and kept that money.

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You sound like you work for Mercedes (you do, don’t you?). A lot of misinformation and erroneous assumptions in your post.

Every time I called MBFS, before they would give me any info they confirmed my identity, so they knew I was the customer and not a dealer. I didn’t need any ‘educating’ lol. I made it very clear I needed a dealer quote and they struggled with getting that done. So, you’re wrong.

And I did go to 2 Mercedes Benz dealerships to try to sell the car to them. They each offered $2k less than what Rodo did. So, wrong again.

But thanks for trolling!

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Just want to say, Toyota Financial has been the opposite for me, I called, gave them Carvanas fax, and they confirmed receipt of the payoff quote in 30 minutes.

However it took forever for Toyota to process the payoff because they have a huge back log. I think it took 6 weeks, just got my MSDs in the mail.

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I think we can summarize this as the following: Dealers HATE carvana and similars. Sites like this are forcing dealers to overpay at auction because Carvana and others are beating out traditional trade-in values by decent margin. Dealers can’t get the used car supply they once had. As a result, they’re crying wolf to the manufacturers. I don’t know how they could do it, but I expect language to be added to lease contracts that just punish non traditional dealer buyouts, etc.

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But according to “experts” the commercial real estate market is never going to recover. Because companies have realized so many efficiencies due to their workforce working from home…hahahaha…right! Any time I call somewhere now I get the same long wait time and the recording about “we are working from home so expect longer wait times.”

Hoping you can help as I’m currently in the exact same process (selling to Vroom and just got off the phone with MBFS to have them fax over the payoff). Vroom’s offer was ~$2,500 less than the “private” payoff that was showing in my online account. I knew I’d be taking a hit but this is a pricey lease and it still makes sense to get into something cheaper, so I made the $2,500 payment and therefore now my private payoff amount is exactly equal to Vroom’s offer. Now I’m seeing that the “dealer” payoff may be higher, so I’d owe even more. How big was the difference between “private” and “dealer” payoff in your case?

Did you try selling it to an MBFS dealer? Apparently, they can pull the payoff quote too.

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