Toyota Dealership Experience
UX STRATEGY AND CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Duration: 3 Weeks
Overview
This was a UX Strategy and Design project where each team facilitated as a client for one team, and a designer for another. Each group was to come up with a project prompt posing as a company, and this prompt would be assigned to another team for which they would act as consultants hired by the group. This means that each team played a double role as a client for one group, and consultant for another.
The prompt we received from Team Toyota was as follows:
“Toyota is looking for opportunities to connect their dealerships to one another with the goal of sharing knowledge and growing their dealerships’ market share.
As an internal UX team for Toyota, you will not only align the vision of geographically and functionally distant dealerships but also establish an industry standard for inter-dealership communication, allowing them to share business strategies and promote synergy.”
GUIDING QUESTIONS
Why do dealerships need/want to talk to each other?
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Why would they partner with other dealerships?
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How does this impact the overall customer experience?
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How do dealerships currently communicate?
CURRENT TRADE DEALER PROCESS
Dealerships often maintain relationships with other dealers of the same brand in their area, allowing them to carry out trades. The most common method is to swap for a similarly equipped vehicle. Sometimes the dealer that has the sought-after car will request a different vehicle from the one it traded so it can replenish whatever inventory it lacks, or the dealership that has helped out a fellow dealer might just bank that favor, saving for an occasion in which one of its salespeople needs a specific car to make a sale.
We created a rough storyboard to visualize the interaction and experience for a customer looking for a particular vehicle with certain specifications, and the customer-dealership 1-dealership 2 exchanges that take place.
Research and Design
SECONDARY RESEARCH
We used the guiding questions mentioned in the beginning to conduct research from secondary sources. Some of the main insights were as follows:
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Dealerships experience feelings of unfairness when customers waste a salesperson's time by spending hours questioning them only to buy from another dealer.
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Toyota has an established Sonic Automotive Guest Experience customer-centric sales process that is speedy and offers transparent, no-negotiation low pricing.
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"Imagine bars," tall tables outfitted with iPads, in case customers want to do online research, price comparisons or car configuration on their own."
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Dealerships do not communicate with each other to share business strategies since they are all in competition with one another. Their customer experience is entirely up to the dealership itself.
COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
Following the preliminary research, we conducted a comparative analysis with multiple existing platforms for intercommunication between different branches of an establishment in order to get insights into how and for what purpose it is conducted, and ways in which it could be relevant to our project. We looked into sources like tire dealer systems, Health Information Exchange (HIE), experiences at other vehicle brand dealerships, and Multiple Listing Services (MLS).
With that, we then listed visible strengths and weaknesses of the systems.
The main takeaways were:
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Geographic location may have different restrictions on user information
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Industries can have competition but still share information
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Discussion forums are useful for dealers to talk (informally)
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Chat rooms for inter-dealership communication primarily deal with incentive charts, data, etc.
USER INTERVIEWS
In order to get primary insights from our user group, we conducted five interviews (2 dealers, 3 customers). They were informal, semi-structured interviews in order to allow for the participants to give us ample insight into their experiences as their different roles. Based on these conversations, we were able to gather the following information:
"There’s really no other interaction, we’re all competitors. We’re not sharing ideas with each other."
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The car-buying process is streamlined if users come in knowing what they want. They value transparency from both ends.
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Dealerships contact other dealerships through phone call, texting, email, and carry out 8-10 trades per month.
SERVICE BLUEPRINT
Equipped with these insights, we sought out to create an initial service blueprint in Miro of the current experience as it stands for a customer looking to buy a new car at a dealership.
EXPERIENCE PRINCIPLES
In order to guide our ideation following insights from the service blueprint, we came up with experience principles as a team. We decided to focus our efforts to three of those principles, which are marked by stars in the picture, and decided to rescope.
Hence, our new problem statement was:
How do we refine the trade deal process to positively impact the Toyota customer journey experience?
IDEATION AND TESTING
We did individual sketches on the three main experience principles that were identified, and conducted expectation vs. reality testing with four participants with wireframes of the designs in the following manner:
GOAL : Determine how users understood our concept
STRUCTURE : Show a specific feature and see how they interpret its purpose and capabilities
SCENARIO : "Imagine you are a car salesperson…"
INSIGHTS :
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There needed to be distinction between the dealership's personal inventory, and the shared inventory in the portal.
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There was confusion about what car colors and status colors meant since there was an overlap.
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Users preferred to search for what they needed by entering in the car's model, and to make results visible by the nearest located dealership.
WIREFRAMES
One of our final deliverables were tablet wireframes depicting our design solution:
A portal where dealerships have the ability to view vehicles available in the inventory of other nearby dealerships in the event they need to organize a trade deal with one to satisfy a customer. This cuts down time spent in calling up nearby dealerships to verbally ask them, as well as accounts for any changes in the status of availability (available for trade, sold, currently being negotiated for a customer and cannot be guaranteed).
Dealers can search by model, and sort by specifications of the car that they need to view, showing results from the nearest-located dealerships for which the radius may be set.
Below, we have a modified storyboard of the customer experience after implementing our solution.
FINAL SERVICE BLUEPRINT
Reflection
This was an interesting project to work on, if not a little daunting in the beginning because of how unfamiliar I was with the space we were working in. We had about three weeks to complete this project, and I am proud of the output my team was able to produce in such a short time. Of course, there were constraints due to the fully online nature of exchange, but we were very organized, and it helped to explicitly outline our goals and guiding principles for each step to keep us on track.
If we had more time, I would have liked to expand more on the solution and experience to accommodate for specifics that we did not get to explore, as well as gather insights from more participants to make informed decisions. I would also have liked to test with actual dealers to get first-hand feedback, but time and availability constraints did not allow for it.