Automotive - eCommerce and Service Scheduling Experience (Pitch Work)
Challenge:
To re-design the legacy website to create a vibrant and intuitive tire shopping and vehicle servicing experience that enhances the Big O Tires brand and builds a robust direct to consumer relationship.
Solution:
After comprehending the competitive landscape and the current industry trends, the solution had to have a three-fold advantage of customized, personalized, and contextualized. I decided to use a responsive design framework to maximize usage of mobile features like location and camera as well as increase the digital touch points. In addition, I created and demoed an easy to use Chatbot concept where a user can book a vehicle servicing appointment in less than a minute.
This work was a proposal to the client's RFP that allowed us to showcase the art of possible that eventually led us to win the project. The re-designed website can be found here.
My Role and Deliverables:
I worked as a Design Lead and primarily worked on the strategy and concept. In addition, I worked on designing quick solutions and wireframes to building prototypes. I also made a demo of chatbot and how technology can help to bring some fun and reduce the mundane chores. The deliverables that I produced for this pitch work are as below.
Design Strategy & Concepts
Wireframes
Prototype
Chatbot demo
Market research and Studying legacy website:
Even though the client had briefed about the challenges at high-level, I started with industry research and scanning the legacy website to identify the missing pieces of the puzzle that were stopping from providing a good customer experience.
It was critical to understand the current state of the website and the challenges.
Few of the problems identified were:
Difficult to make an appointment
User was overwhelmed with the options to select
No geo-location based recommendation
User cannot create an account/profile
No data, no recommendation - As no data is being tracked currently, the user does not receive any recommendations for servicing
All store pages seem similar. There is no differentiation from store to store and thus the users may not feel personalized service
Lacking strong transaction flow
No customer or franchise input/integration
“ The trust in the automotive service industry is comparatively lower ”
Identification of strategic pillars:
After finding the problems in the legacy website, I and other designers brainstormed and categorized the problems. Through this exercise, the team was able to identify 3 pillars that could tackle the above issues. The three themes were:
Theme 1 - Personalize
When customers visit the website they can expect the website to know who they are, what they drive, and what they've purchased.
The tactics for this strategic pillar were to build a customer profile, collect information, select store/favorite store, know the location (geo-locate), what vehicle the customer is driving, and history/preferences.
Theme 2 - Contextualize
When customers browse on the website they can expect contextual cues throughout the shopping flow to recommend the right product, service, or insight at the right time.
To achieve this theme it would be essential to learn who and where the customer is, integrate content in the shopping flow, provide proactive solutions for car related service, and better recommendations based on preferences.
Theme 3 - Customize
When the franchise on the website wants to support their store, they can expect a more personable, knowledgeable store-like feel to the user experience.
To provide a tailored experience, stores can customize the page, show promotional material on a flexible store page, improve "My Store" navigation and personalized branding on storefront pages.
The overall arching motive was to "Build Trust" by making the customers feel that their needs are anticipated and met. Moreover, BigOTires.com can deliver helpful content before and after the transaction that builds confidence and loyalty through repeat engagement.
Three-legged stool - it was imperative to balance the three pillars to provide a harmonious experience.
concepts and wireframes:
After deciding on the strategic pillars and tactics, it was essential to execute designs to convey the vision. I worked on concept sketching through scenarios, landing page sketches and flows like searching for the right tire. Below are few of the responsive web wireframes for desktop and mobile.
Another challenge that I worked on was to find a solution that could provide an engaging experience to the customer to complete the boring tasks of scheduling vehicle service. Typically, a service appointment is booked over a website that asks a lot of questions and may not be mobile friendly. The other way to book an appointment is over a phone call which could be highly time-consuming for both, customers and franchises. After looking at the trends in customer service, chatbots were an upcoming solution that was being implemented in different industries. Thus I considered creating a solution using chatbot that can eliminate the need for human beings to pick up a phone and enter all the data every single time. For the purpose of the demo, I initially went through a step by step process and how a typical user would book an appointment using phone/web form. I scripted a dialog between a bot and a human being to ensure that I was following the correct flow and what I wanted to achieve by the end of the conversation.
To demo this vision to the client, I had to implement the chatbot using NLU-NLP AI/ML platform. After investigating a couple of services I decided to go with motion.ai, firstly it served the purpose of the demo, secondly it was easy to create rules, and lastly, it was a simple WYSISYG editor. The below video shows the demo of a user scheduling an appointment for different services.
Chatbot Demo using Motion.ai
Outcomes:
The pitch work was extremely successful and helped the team to win a huge business.
The chatbot and efforts taken to successfully demo were highly appreciated by my team as well as the client.
This pitch work was converted into an internal case study for setting up a great model of collaboration with designers and SMEs.
The complete strategy to design and execution of the demo was completed within a rigorous time frame of 8 days.
The project was successfully completed by the team and launched in 2018. Though I was not part of the actual project team, a lot of concepts from this pitch work were implemented. The re-designed website can be found here.