Frictionless Car Dealership Experience with Omnichannel Touchpoints

To future-proof themselves, car dealerships must be willing to adapt in order to survive and thrive or else miss a unique opportunity to catapult themselves way ahead in the digital sales game. One of the ways to achieve this is to fine-tune their e-commerce solutions and enable customers to dig deeply into the offering online before coming into the dealership.

Role:

Product Designer & Strategist

Project Type:

Project Pitch → MVP Development

Client:

Mitsubishi

✹ About

Enhancing Active Consideration Stages with Human-Digital Touchpoint

The automotive industry has certainly been among the hardest hit during the pandemic. The repercussions are immense and unprecedented and even made worse with prospective buyers less inclined to want to interact with sellers at car dealerships.

There is a need to create an ecosystem that is embedded in the dealership and integrated with the sales manager, the salespeople, and the after-sales team. And it needs to be seamless throughout the whole journey. This app is conceptualised to enhance the car-buying experience.

⏱︎

8 weeks (Design Pitch → PRE-MVP Development)

✺

Collaborators:
Stakeholders
1 IT Consultant
1 Product Manager
1 Product Designer

Activities:
Market Research
Product Strategy
Feature Prioritization
High Fidelity Prototype

✹ Research

The Choices are Constantly Changing

Faced with a plethora of choices, ads, and stimulations, consumers tend to fall back on the limited set of brands that have made it through the wilderness of messages. Not all is lost for car manufacturer excluded from this first stage, however. Contrary to the traditional funnel metaphor, the current consumer journey shows the number of brands under consideration during the active-evaluation phase may now actually expand rather than narrow as consumers seek information to do their due diligence.

Graph 1.0

Graph 1.1

TL;DR: The project goal is to find MarTech solutions to get into consumers’ consideration early and then continue to stay on the journey with them afterward when they’re more committed to make their purchase.

In the past, winning over a consumer often led to long-term loyalty. Today, consumers are more attracted to new and cooler options. This trend is evident in the automotive industry, which has low loyalty (chart 1.1) and faces disruptive changes from new market entrants offering diverse mobility, autonomous driving, electrification, and connectivity.

That said, this project operates under the understanding that consumer research and buying habits have changed, but failing to adjust marketing strategies has hindered reaching customers at key decision moments. This shift requires marketers to see it as an opportunity to provide timely information and support, rather than a loss of influence

TL;DR: The project's value lies in leveraging technology and strategy to harness Personalization and Community-driven content (graph 1.3) , empowering customers in an era where purchase decisions are increasingly influenced by other customer reviews over company information.

ℹ️ 📂 To honor my NDA, I'm unable to reveal the full extent of the internal processes involved in this project. Thank you for your understanding

✹ Solutions

Customer App

Unlike most conventional car marketplaces, this app aims to create the human-digital blend in a car buying process. The trick is to understand where human interaction is most wanted and invest there - in this case: in the evaluation and active-consideration stages. Bringing face-to-face product expertise and digital seamlessness into the equation

The app is optimized for desktop experience to allow customers to get full experience of the product, they can also get a 3D view of the product and inspect the specs of the car whilst conversing with the sales personnel. Additionally, it offers features that enables both sales and customer to get specific with Car configurations all the way to financing and insurance options.

Sales Agent App

With plethora of options and brands, sales agents need to give potential customers their utmost care and attention. How? By anticipating what they desire. And how can you anticipate that? Manage their data correctly and manage it in an easy and smooth way - provided it is all within data compliance regulation.

Utilising various data points, this app is equipped with features to help salesperson assesses buyer intent signals. With reassurance and helpful advice, salespeople can hopefully convince even the most sceptical buyers to take the plunge and buy a car.

While preparing for the session, sales personnel can keep track of all leads (both prospect & suspect) and preparing themselves with different assets through the list of sales bulletins that are currently in circulation.

The use cases of the mobile app extends beyond the remote session, they can also add their leads right from the app even if they met the customer through in-store interaction