Challenge
The automotive industry is going through rapid change as new technologies drive an evolution in both the nature of the product and also in customer expectations. Nissan is one of the most successful and mainstream manufacturers with lots of proven ability to deliver new technologies into their range of products - but customers are now looking for a different kind of relationship with brands, and their expectations are mostly not being met within the car industry as it currently exists.
Our focus for the duration of this project was to look at how those new customer expectations might be better understood and met, and how this might affect short, medium and longer-term planning. My role was to lead the project from Interbrand’s side, manage the relationship with Nissan and act as a guide to a relatively inexperienced client team.
Solution
First 100 Days - Immerse in the brand experience
During the first 100 days of the project, the team immersed in the current Nissan customer experience through a program of inward-focused and external research across four key markets.
We defined an archetypal journey that was used to audit the current experience in UK, USA, Japan and China.
We created a single customer journey mapped across all major touchpoints and used this to audit the experience in Japan, China, USA and the UK. This audit used brand and experience metrics to roll up into as single experience score, and give the team some clues as to where the brand was performing well, and where it was not.
We also focused on key competitors to understand how they compared in delivering a great automotive experience - as well as looking beyond the category to pull in any exemplary examples of great customer experience across the customer journey.
Current State Customer Journey
We mapped the existing experience into an aggregate view across all markets, showing where all customer pain points and positive experiences were.
To pull in real customer insight we used the Streetbees market research platform to connect with current car buyers (who were including Nissan in their possible purchase set) and find out how they found the experience of researching and buying a car. We also interviewed friends and family to round out the research.
Second 100 Days - Create experience strategy & tools
Having gathered a very large amount of insight into the way that Nissan currently meets the needs of customers (and where it doesn’t do such a great job), we then set out to create all of the tools needed to help start to unify the way that the business designs experiences for its customers:
Customer personas
Our global persona set were design focus future designers on the needs, wants and desires of Nissan customers.
Once we had create our personas and validated these with the regions and functions in the business, we were able to create a view on the ideal state future customer experience for Nissan customers. We did this for a couple of different time horizons: the very near term (to connect with current business planning) and one focused on three years’ time. For flexibility, we created multiple views on the future state journey, ranging from super detailed to a higher level poster:
Key moments
For all key moments in the journey we created a detailed slide showing how our vision should be brought to life.
Detailed journey
We created a huge spreadsheet referencing all key moments for each persona, where they overlapped, and how each moment delivered against our experience principles.
In tandem with this more theoretical future view, we began to use our tools to bring significant moments within the experience to life - by prototyping the experience we aimed to connect more deeply with Nissan’s leadership and regional teams. We felt it would be easier to show how the experience should look and feel by allowing people to play and interact:
We picked three key moments from our future state experience and rapid prototyped them to show how they might feel and behave
Third 100 Days - Vision & Rollout
The final period of the project was designed to build a singular vision for experience for NIssan, and also to create a platform for delivering the strategy to the rest of the business through the regions. Highlights were:
An Experience Strategy: containing our Experience Principles, connecting into an Experience Vision that embodied the NIssan brand as it is brought to life in the experience
An Evaluation Framework: I created a set of design heuristics that connected back into our Experience Principles to help design practitioners evaluate whether a Nissan experience is delivering against the brand and experience strategy
A CX Measurement Strategy: to operationalise the CX work, I created a strategy designed to introduce CX metrics into Nissan’s current, mostly channel-centric measurement approach. The strategy defined ways to measure key journeys using NPS and a set of questions linked to the Experience Principles.
An Internal Engagement plan: workshopping with key team members at Nissan and Interbrand, I helped shape a plan for how to engage and connect with key internal audiences in Nissan across the world.
My role
Experience Direction and Strategy Lead, Project Planning, team mentor