Enhancing the Customer Journey of an Automotive OEM Brand
Enhancing the end-to-end Customer Journey of an Automotive OEM.
Client information has been redacted due to NDA issues
Domain:
Design Research | Service Design
Collaborators:
Team of 7 members
Contributed as a UX Researcher
While working with the Research and Strategy team at the Industrial Design Studio, Tata Elxsi, we were approached by a renowned and well-established Indian automotive brand to take a close look at their existing customer service experience for the Commercial Vehicle segment and further analyse the findings to bring in an improved customer journey.
Keywords
Client
A renowned Automotive OEM | via Tata Elxsi
Design Research, Customer Experience, Commercial Vehicles, Pan India, Automotive OEM, Strategy.
Duration
8 months
Design Process
With a timeline of 8 months, this project comprised of closely understanding the pain points and challenges faced by the customers where secondary and primary research took 4 months, and the analysis and devising the recommendations and strategies took another 4 months.
Secondary Research
A thorough secondary research phase was conducted to understand the brand, its principles, strategies, competitions and standing in the market. These were done through various sub stages which have been outlined below.
Stages:
Context Setting
The research began by understanding the principles and regulations that the brand follows by studying its Sales and Service Process Manuals which helped us understand their existing customer journey and other processes a little better.
Store Visit
We visited the client's commercial vehicle dealerships across multiple locations in India in order to study the customer experience offered at each of these. We then further visited the stores of competition brands (Ashok Leyland and Eicher), other Automotive Industries brands (Maruti Suzuki Nexa and Royal Enfield) and consumer goods brand (Croma) in order to gauge the evolving lifestyle, consumer behavior, and aspirations of users across industries in India. This also helped us in studying different user experiences offered across such consumer-facing industries.
This also helped us in comparing the in-store experiences focusing on the following, although not limited to this:
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Interaction by dealership staff
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Space planning, and facilities at the dealership
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Availability of sales material such as brochures and other documents for the customers
Netnography
At this stage, we were looking into the client's online presence and conducting a heuristic analysis of the client's website and then comparing it to its competition brands (Ashok Leyland, Eicher, Bharat Benz), other Automotive Industries brands (Maruti Suzuki Nexa and Royal Enfield), and an e-commerce platform (Amazon) in order to understand to workflow practices and user experience provided. We conducted the assessment based on the following points, but not limited to:
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Website information architecture
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Aesthetics and interaction
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Linguistic clarity
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Consistency between the main website and microsites
A sneak peak of the heuristic analysis
A customer journey noticed during a visit to a Maruti Suzuki Nexa showroom
Stages of the customer journey
The customer journey that we were looking into was a holistic one. There were a total of larger 4 stages with multiple substages. This involved:
Observations from secondary research
Based on the secondary research, the most important observation we had is that the in-store customer experience is much more premium when compared to commercial vehicle segment. Visiting a car/bike showroom was a pleasant experience beginning from the hospitality provided, interaction with the sales personnel, and the in-vehicle experience. The sales team took a keen interest in our requirements, provided in-depth information about the vehicle and finances, and continued to follow up with us for weeks after the visit. In comparison, most of the commercial vehicle brands were unenthusiastic about our visit. The dealerships and staff were unimpressive, and there was a lack of follow up after customer visit.
Field Tool Development
After gathering insights from the secondary research phase, we started developing our field tools for our in-depth primary research. These includes discussion guides, observation guides, and On-field protocols for the facilitators, observers and note takers to understand the on-ground customer journey, on-ground customer journey, customers' experience with the brand, the challenges they faced, and their expectations from an automotive brand.
Field Tools used for further study
Discussion Guides
Primary Research
What followed next was the primary research phase over a period of 3 months. The processes and the stages which were followed next has been outlined below.
Stages:
In-Depth Interviews
This phase involved interacting with 151 customers of the client and their competitions across 12 cities in India. These users were divided into 15 distinct user groups as mentioned above. Each interaction were an hour long where we learned about their customer experience, pain points faced across the entire journey, and their expectations and suggestions about areas for improvements.
Contextual Enquiry and Ethnography
Along with the 151 customers, we also interacted with 90 stakeholders of the client from Sales, Service and Resales segment. This was done to understand the process followed by the stakeholders to facilitate the on-ground customer journey across India. We also looked into the complaints and suggestions that they have received over the years for improving the customer experience.
Overview of User and Stakeholder sample and defining target groups
The 151 commercial vehicle segment customers were further divided into 15 larger user groups over 12 cities in India who were regular users of either and both the client's and its competition's vehicles
User and Stakeholder Samples:
Target Groups
Observations from primary research
The client's dealerships across India did not offer the most consistent customer experience to all. It was deeply divided. The hospitality and user experience was much more elaborate and pleasant for customers owning the most number of trucks or buses. There was deep dissatisfaction amongst customers due to this reason which resulted either in bad customer experience or loss of loyal customers to other customer brands. This was seen throughout Sales, Service and Resales categories.
The second thing that was noticed was the inconsistency in customer experience across different dealerships in India. This was primarily due to three reasons:
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The stakeholders altering the sales and service processes as per the dealerships.
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Presence of multiple redundant steps in the processes causing each stakeholder to omit tasks and digress from a common process.
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Lack of a centralized system for monitoring dealerships across the county
Data Synthesis & Analysis
After the primary research, the interviews were transcribed for all 241 respondents. Next followed the data synthesis and analysis phase where the analysis phase was divided into three phases: Micro, Macro and Mega Analysis.
What we noticed:
Out of the four personalities, the follower personalities required more assistance from the stakeholders, throughout the stages of sales, service and resales as they are generally new to starting out in their fields. Although what could be seen was that the stakeholders were providing the utmost assistance to trend-setters although they were pretty experienced in their line of business and were very much acquainted with the brand and its processes.
Development of the Customer Journey
We mapped individual user's journeys into stages and then collated the individual journeys together to arrive at the comprehensive customer journey consisting of 4 major stages with multiple touchpoints. The customer journey captured the following aspects:
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Duration of a touchpoint in the customer journey (ranging from hours to weeks)
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Locations involved in the touchpoint such the dealership, user premises, truck yards, and markets
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Mediums of interaction involved in the touchpoint such as digital interactions, face to face conversations, and telephonic conversations
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Primary emotions experienced by the user ranging from positive to negative based on RobertPlutchik's emotion wheel
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Pain points experience by the users at a touchpoint
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Expectations of the user for improving the experience at a touchpoint
Individual Customer Journey of a User Group
Overall Customer Journey Mapping
Further Development
After studying the insights and takeaways from the Affinity Mapping, Customer Journeys, Site Visits and a close look at the competition brands, we devised strategies and recommendations for the client to further enhance the client's customer journey. Some of the recommendations involved altering the process manuals by simplifying tasks, eliminating redundant processes, and automating some processes. For the user experience, certain recommendations were kept forward to enhance the customer onboarding efficiency, provide them adequate support as they go through the sale and service journey, and enable users to gradually transition into digital services.
Recommendation: Effort vs Impact Mapping
We plotted all the recommendations on an Effort vs. Impact Matrix, in order to help the client prioritize the recommendations that required less effort but delivered maximum impact.
Effort Vs Impact Matrix for the recommendations of Stage 1 in the customer journey
In the pipeline
During our last interaction with the client, we got to know that one of their showroom and service centers in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh is being remodeled in accordance with our recommendations of the enhanced customer journey. They are considering this as a model example and will be implementing these changes to their service manuals and overall customer experience if their testing works well in the betterment of the customers as well as the client themselves.
