improving the car buying experience

Our team at frog worked with Cox Automotive to assess the car purchasing process and identify opportunities to improve the experience. The expectation level of consumers has been elevated by service oriented companies like Amazon and Apple. We looked at ways to enhance the end-to-end car purchasing experience, one of the largest purchases of many people’s lives, through the lens of the customer, while also keeping the dealer as the primary mediator.

Our team spent two weeks immersing ourselves in the current car purchasing process. We participated on both sides of the table, as a dealer as well as a customer. Our immersion phase included: secret shopping, customer interviews, wholesale auction visits, subject matter expert interviews, dealer interviews, OEM interviews and stakeholder interviews.

Buying a car can be scary and one biggest fears for the consumer is getting a bad deal. Price and inventory is transparent today through various online platforms. Dealers cannot simply rely on the lowest price and largest inventory any more. Dealers must exceed transactional experiences to drive value and loyalty for the New Buyer.

We identified specific pain points in the current car purchase flow and designed multiple experiences to empower the New Buyer through a frictionless shopping journey. We created experience storyboards that featured discovering, testing and purchasing a vehicle all while focusing on transparency and convenience. We looked at mobility as a subscription model, allowing the customer to select the plan that suits their needs each month. The experience illustrated below, Blue +, focuses on the maintenance as well as resale of the vehicle. A new integrated service collects performance, vehicle usage and repair data to predict maintenance recommendations and inspections.