Mapping customer journeys to identify and prioritise opportunities for a leading automotive finance provider
Driving innovation
Since 1994, Volkswagen Financial Services UK have offered a wide range of finance, servicing and insurance products for some of the world’s most recognisable automotive brands, including Volkswagen, Audi, and SEAT.
Their mission goes beyond providing traditional vehicle financing to developing innovative customer-centred products, designed to solve real problems. But with so many possibilities and opportunities across a business of this scale, it was challenging to know where to begin.
Route planning
Volkswagen Financial Services approached 383 looking for support to cut through the noise and prioritise the areas that really mattered to their customers. By identifying, interrogating and mapping customer pain points across their PCH and PCP finance products, we would define a series of product and service prototypes for future business development. In turn, this would inform a new ‘North Star’ company vision to steer the business towards a truly innovative and customer-centric future.
Hitting the road
For this project, we used our ‘friction mapping’ framework, combining qualitative user research, business insights and customer journey mapping to visualise pain points and areas of anxiety across the user experience. An initial immersion session helped us define an outline for the project. From here, we conducted a number of stakeholder interviews with the Volkswagen Financial Services team and dug into the business data to frame the challenge ahead.
In the driver’s seat
Field research took us to Volkswagen Financial Services call centres and Volkswagen dealerships to talk to frontline team members and listen to direct conversations with customers. This helped us build a detailed picture of how the business worked and how customers were currently interacting with the team.
We added to this with in-depth customer interviews, investigating the underlying issues behind the symptoms we’d observed, using the jobs-to-be-done methodology. Our research spanned new, existing and lapsed customers.
Connecting the dots
After collating and synthesising all of our insights and observations, we were able to define patterns across the customer experience, highlight areas of friction, and identify opportunities for future development. The resulting user journey map showcased more than 80 individual frictions surfaced from our customer interviews, clustered by theme and charted against the anxiety levels experienced at each stage.
Organising the insights in this way would help the Volkswagen Financial Services team prioritise the most urgent issues, and identify initiatives with the highest potential benefit - not only for the business, but for customers too.
Documenting the journey
To empower and enable the Volkswagen Financial Services team internally, we created an in-depth companion deck alongside the journey map, allowing stakeholders to drill down into the detail around specific themes and topics. Insights were supported by direct quotes and audio sound bites from our interviews.
We also produced a short documentary video detailing the process, helping the team foster stakeholder buy-in for the project across the wider business.
383 brought a whole set of specific skills that really drove us past the more obvious stuff, to where the real gains could be made. Having a team like 383 - experts who work with our colleagues and our customers to look at the whole process, end-to-end - allowed us to do something that we just couldn’t do by ourselves.
Where next?
Since sharing the results of the journey mapping project internally, feedback from the Volkswagen Financial Services team has been resoundingly positive. The insights gained have been fundamental in helping Volkswagen Financial Services to refine their ‘North star’ vision, accelerate innovation, and develop business strategy, all whilst placing their customers at the heart of what they do.
Additional projects to develop and validate some of the solutions, ideas and opportunities uncovered through the journey mapping process followed, developing a number of prototype concepts to test directly with Volkswagen Financial Services customers.
