Tucker.Love

The Check In Experience

Customers who booked an appointment would get to the dealership and get a very antiquated experience that lacked insight into why they booked the appointment. Additionally, there were often 5 - 8 different steps for the customer which equates to 5 or more different applications that did not talk to each other. The result was an inconsistent experience from dealership to dealership even with the same manufacturer. When the booking is made and the dealership has no idea why, then there is a high chance of the car not being ready that day. This would frustrate the customer and Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) scores would be very low which would cause the dealership to lose repeat business from that customer.

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Problem

Xtime was gaining traction in the automotive marketplace and they needed to improve their product but they did not have a design team. The current Xtime scheduling product did not have an intuitive workflow and it took users a long time to train in order to perform basic tasks. The current product also had all the features in one massive UI for each dealership and was not roll-based so each user had access to what was turned on for that specific dealership. The time it took to book each appointment was long because there was a lot of details that were difficult to find and if items were skipped - which they often were - then it was difficult for the dealership to know what types of car services were coming in for that day. This made it hard to order parts in advance and also staff the right mechanics who can do very specific jobs.

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Solution

Xtime hired me as the Director of User Experience where I had to define the product roadmap, design process, the UX team roles, and the initial versions of the product that was validated by the core user personas. This role was new to the company but they had a team of executives who believed that the design thinking process will be a smart business decision. I had to prove myself with the methods with a tablet product first and then focus on the book appointment flow. After the win with the check-in tablet redesign I created a framework for the product team where I felt it would make sense to have a product manager and a UX design work as a pair on a product or two.

Results

Xtime was able to segment the initial product into five different products and sell these individually to increase their sales for each dealership. The core success metric was the time to book with accuracy and this was greatly reduced with a higher accuracy rate boost of 30%. The new redesign also allowed dealerships to better understand why customers were coming in so they could be prepared with parts and skilled mechanics. The customer experience was also more consistent and the customer had a higher chance of the work done on their car to be done in the same day. James built and managed a design team that shipped over five new products and two redesigns in three years.