Dealer Portal

A San Francisco company set on making the car buying process more like digital purchases, tasked us with helping them redesign their first product offering: a portal to help dealers manage their website purchasing and application system. The existing portal was a conglomeration of hundreds of data points along a customer’s journey and they wanted help to make it more visually appealing and easier to navigate.

We used contextual inquiry to better understand how dealers themselves were interfacing with the product. At the same time, we interviewed key stakeholders internally who used the product in the service of dealership customers. Analysis of stakeholder interviews helped us determine that much of the issues were related to administrators, salespersons, and on-boarding agents who all needed access to esoteric data when solving technical issues. Analysis of our dealership research, however, revealed that much of the data being surfaced to the dealers was simply noise – they just wanted to see where in the online sales funnel a customer was at any given time.

We wanted to make sure we were not interrupting a dealership’s existing CRM or inventory management tools, and wanted to surface the correct customer information only when needed. We proposed a massive product shift based on our dealership research: to re-contextualize the portal as a product suite (with each product determined by user role) with the customer at the center. In this way, we encouraged a more empathetic relationship between sales and prospective buyers.

Users at each level could now see a contextualized page of clear, actionable status pages and easy navigation to necessary information. Agents could reduce dealer on-boarding time to days rather than weeks with a nearly self-service flow; Salespeople could more easily access a snapshot of the customer’s journey in the buying process (allowing them to tailor their sales messages to the needs of a customer); and Dealerships saw a boost in quality of leads, as the system could clearly separate those who were “just browsing” from those who could be converted into customers.