Premium automotive brand: driving to visionary customer care

In a highly disrupted automotive market, our client has a bold ambition to become the fastest-growing premium brand. Within five years, it aims to achieve 50% of sales through a direct-to-customer model that offers flexible leasing and subscription options. The model is built around a distinctive proposition: a modern, personalised experience and a seamless blend of product and service experiences.

The challenge: putting customer relationships at the heart of growth

While our client’s ambition was clear, the digital product underpinning the proposition wasn’t fully understood by the end markets around the world and there was no shared vision of how to deliver it. In addition, the service platform on which the product relied was hard to scale globally, having evolved to address technology requirements rather than those of customers or end users – the service agents.

The new product leadership team, who were gradually transitioning into new roles, asked us to address these challenges and help realise their transformation ambitions.

The solution: building a shared vision, refocusing on user experience and reinforcing technology

We drew on our specialisms in customer experience, technology and strategy to establish a joint team focused on enabling agents to deliver consistent and seamless customer experiences in over 20 markets worldwide. We had four key objectives:

• co-create a single shared vision for the product
• drive a shift in culture to establish ‘one global team’
• refocus on the user experience for service agents
• reinforce the service platform.

To co-create a single shared vision, we collaborated with our client’s global and regional digital and operational teams, using our Experience Maturity Assessment Tool (XMAT) to help them define their aspirations and understand how to align disparate regional practices. Together, we explored customer experiences throughout the entire journey, from becoming aware of the brand to enjoying their car, to identify the main areas for improvement. The output of this work was a set of global standards for the product and a three-year road map for achieving the vision.

We knew that successful transformation would depend on more than delivery and technical excellence. It would take a shift in culture too. To harness diverse national perspectives and establish ‘one global team’, we deployed our Business, eXperience & Technology (BXT) methodology. This use three powerful lenses to drive the development of new digitally enabled customer experiences. We created a strong, trusted team dynamic (despite the pandemic) using online tools such as Strava (social/fitness) and Notion (project/collaboration). Coaching and skills development helped to build the team’s knowledge and confidence.

Next, we worked together on refocusing the product on the user experience. Our BXT Service Design approach helped the product team articulate what the core product should look like from a user’s perspective. We connected data requirements to user experience and pain points, making essential improvements across five key capabilities: case management, knowledge management, omnichannel routing and webforms, retailer collaboration, and insights and analytics.

Given user experience (UX) was new to our client, we helped form a strong team with essential, new UX roles. We launched weekly global user research panels and created an ongoing user feedback loop that was essential for the digital product (development) teams. In under 10 weeks, we designed new capabilities in case, account and vehicle management for call centre agents and retailers, along with a chat feature for customers.

The final piece of the jigsaw was to reinforce the service platform. We conducted a BXT discovery and technical assessment of Salesforce to create a set of recommended next steps to eventually consolidate or retire disparate instances within a coherent global template. Informed by these assessments, we began rapid remediation of the ‘technical debt’, starting by fixing high-severity issues that impacted data quality and security. As a result, stability and performance improved, giving a faster and more reliable response to agents and customers using the product platform and establishing a strong foundation for new product releases.

The outcomes: putting service agents in the driving seat

We successfully delivered on our four key objectives in under 12 months and, in many instances, within weeks. Our energetic approach brought a new sense of pace, dynamism and user-focus to help our client boost team performance, reinvigorate the culture and development capability, and establish a secure and stable technology platform as the basis for premium customer relationships.
Product teams now actively champion user-centric design and are equipped with essential technical, design and user-research skills. The approach not only addresses user issues, but also envisions a future for the product as a leader in service innovation. The product, which now has AI, digital machine learning, chatbots, analytics and intelligent conversation profiling, has the best service roadmap in the sector.

With a globally enhanced product live across all markets and a clear vision that puts users in the driving seat to continually test, improve and innovate, service agents now have the tools they need to build strong, lasting direct relationships with customers and help our client realise its growth ambitions.

Measurable results^[1]

• Customer sentiment – 6.25 x times higher customer NPS score, rising from 4 to 25 over 12 months
• Users & adoption growth – 209% increase in global users over 12 months
• Team performance – High-performing global digital teams, with vision alignment up from 0 to 8.3/10, ambassadorship 8.3/10, wellbeing and happiness 7.9/10, and a sense of personal growth 8.4/10
• From global ideas to code release – 20+ global complex backlogs consolidated into a single set of global requirements, boosting product design and speed of requirements to build
• User testing & research – from 0% user research and testing to 100% UX research embedded weekly. 115 UX enhancements identified and in design in under three months
• Capability & new skills – Significant upskilling in UX globally, from 3.4 to 4.25/5