Customers are profoundly influenced by the broad range of experiences they encounter in their daily lives - the many helpful, integrated omnichannel experiences shaping the landscape in retail, QSR, financial services, and more. As automobiles become increasingly digital and connected, the journey of automobile ownership is no exception to this change. As with many industries, aftermarket automobile servicing has suffered from lack of critical investment in digital, entrenched processes, and a business-as-usual operational mindset that has failed to keep up with customer and employee needs. 

The client challenge

Our goal was to define the ideal future state of aftermarket servicing, using an integrated cross-disciplinary approach and service design methods to deliver the vision, document the backstage capabilities required to enable, build the investment case, and set the roadmap to deliver to market in an iterative, agile delivery model.

But that's not all...

We were further asked to quickly activate priorities to accelerate learning and shorten the runway to scale across the organization. We quickly defined our priorities, shaped our MVP requirements, prototyped, developed, and launched features as part of a modernized digital  operating model. 

Ethnographic research to document the current-state

Our research including a mix of in-depth customer interviews, in-store research, and employee and owner/operator interviews. We mapped and aligned critical pain points creating friction for each actor in the service ecosystem, helping us understand the systemic gaps preventing the client from delivering a compelling end-to-end experience that served both customers and employees while delivering sustained value. 

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Aligning our core value propositions

In a changing business context it's important not only to bolt on digital solutions to an standard business model or existing workflows, processes, and technology enabling the current state. It is critical to understand the flow of value and we must evolve our identity to better serve unmet needs and deliver value to the business. We oriented our value propositions to maximize our opportunity to deliver a differentiated experience and drive customer, employee, and owner/operator engagement

Defining the future state

We conducted several co-creation workshops to document the core features of our value propositions, each describing a component of the service for our different service actors, and tying together the front-stage narrative  illustrating the relationships of different features (and corresponding actions and processes) as they address different customer, employee, or owner/operator needs as they manifest across a shared end-to-end journey. 

Prototyping and Service Blueprinting

Working across different functions within the client ecosystem, we mapped the people, processes, and technologies impacted by our future state, and documented the critical capabilities required to deliver the future state to market. These service blueprints aided in development of the investment case and helped align our priorities to move quickly and deliver value to the market. Interactive prototypes provided product and engineering partners a much-needed head start to enable delivery (and provided valuable stimulus to test with customers and employees).