With a shift toward digital-first car purchases championed by new entrants, a leading global automotive giant risked significant market share in Australia due to a fragmented buyer journey. The process involved disjointed systems and in-person dealer interactions that had buyers go through multiple loops to book a test drive or get the car delivered. Dealerships struggled with unclear roles and siloed data, missing opportunities while digitally savvy competitors attracted customers.
Continuing to be caught in such headwinds was not an option. The automotive manufacturer turned to Persistent to overhaul its buyer and dealer journeys, helping it defend its market position and share in Australia.
Taking Stock of Experience Barriers
Persistent started with a deep look into the manufacturer’s existing systems, benchmarking the experience against industry standards and that offered by peers, and discovering gaps in:
- Dealer Network Complexity: Despite industry trends toward automation, much of the manufacturer’s sales process remained manual. Dealers allocated test drives, processed trade-ins, and initiated contracts by hand, causing frequent errors and wasting valuable time.
- Inconsistent Customer Experience: Customers navigated disjointed systems, from vehicle configurators to finance calculators and dealer booking tools with different designs and functionalities. The lack of a unified design system, components, and experiences across applications resulted in a confusing, inconsistent journey that undermined confidence in the brand.
- Inefficient Delivery Model: The design and engineering teams worked separately without much coordination or communication. While one group created the visual look and user experience, the other defined technical requirements, but not in alignment. This approach resulted in frequent rework, delivery delays, and a lack of clarity for development teams, hampering the efficient delivery of new features and improvements.
- Stakeholder Misalignment: Feature prioritization was inconsistent with too many internal stakeholders to be effective across marketing, product, and dealer operations. Critical processes such as scheduling test drives and handling trade-in applications did not have clear leaders or owners. As a result, these processes were often delayed because no one was responsible for ensuring they moved forward smoothly. This lack of clarity led to confusion and miscommunication among team members, further slowing things down and making it difficult to meet everyone’s expectations.
A complex and poorly designed purchase journey meant potential buyers frequently abandoned the process. With EV customers more likely to comparison shop, every dropout represented a direct loss of business to competitors.
Bringing Design to Digital Experience
Persistent adopted a consultative flair to reimagine the manufacturer’s digital user experiences and address the barriers through comprehensive research:
- User Research and Stakeholder Workshops: Persistent conducted extensive in-the-field research and engaged the manufacturer’s key stakeholders to uncover requirements, align objectives, and build trust across departments. This helped streamline objectives and goals across teams that earlier operated in silos, ensuring they worked as one to deliver a consistent experience across the buyer journey. Working backwards from the insights from stakeholder discussions and workshops, Persistent validated technical requirements against user experience. This helped identify engineering use cases that could move the needle for the end user, ensuring teams spend time and effort on endeavors that help improve the experience.
- End-to-End Experience Redesign: Persistent delivered detailed user flows, wireframes, and hi-fidelity dev-ready design assets, validated through real-user testing and directly linked to development user stories. The streamlined journey automated manual dealer tasks, reduced complexity, and improved customer satisfaction. This design system can be adopted for other workstreams within the manufacturer’s lines of business, paving the way for scalable design that delivers a consistent brand experience across digital touchpoints.
- Unified Design System: Persistent leveraged a reusable Figma-based design system that brought visual consistency and reduced engineering risk to enable deeper coordination between designers and developers. This system aligned with the manufacturer’s brand guidelines and supported seven major customer journey “epics” or user journeys, from online order to trade-in.
- Close Partnership with Engineering: With these user-experience insights, Persistent was also chosen to engineer the new systems. This helped the manufacturer bring continuity between design and engineering stages. Persistent ensured that designs were dev-ready for future implementations, collaborating closely with the manufacturer’s business analysts and developers to facilitate accurate and confident implementation.
The Journey Ahead
Insights gained through our collaboration with the client is guiding a Salesforce cloud implementation designed to streamline manufacturer’s digital commerce experience for both buyers and dealers. As the end-to-end digital transformation partner that engineers and designs these new systems, we anticipate a significant improvement in stakeholder alignment, automation of manual tasks, and reduced risk of delivery delays through validated, ready-to-implement assets.
The transformation will help the manufacturer deliver a consistent, brand-aligned, seamless purchase journey. We expect a 15% uplift in lead conversions with faster sales cycles, and an increase in sales productivity due to reduced effort leakage and improved cross-functional collaboration. positions the manufacturer to excel in a rapidly evolving market, capturing new sales opportunities while building customer trust with truly digital commerce experience. The customers and dealers can confidently navigate car purchases with a seamless, intuitive experience.
