In the spring of 2016, private lease had started to really gain traction as a form of ownership on the Swedish car market. Volkswagen, because of how business and digital channels were governed was not well positioned to capitalize on the trend nationally as it fell between global, national and dealerships. Where was no proper concept packaging private lease and no digital channels or business model that allowed for VW to pursue this market in digital.
At DDB we had floated the idea of moving leasing online before - the client was skeptical as to wether there was a demand to buy a car online in the first place, but was ready to do an experiment to find out.
My role in this project was quite deep involvement as the developer of the concept & vision but also extended into copywriting, content creation, facilitation, prototyping and even some coding - basically whatever was needed to help the team and stakeholders bring it all together. The team at DDB consisted of UX and visual designer, tech director, digital strategist, business director, producer and front end developer. From Volkswagen we worked with business development, product specialist, Volkswagen Financial Services, IT, marketing director, digital director, sales directors and VWs assorted IT partners.
From hypothesis to the market in 6 weeks.
We set out to do pilot in 6 weeks, to package VW private lease into an easy to communicate concept, and to build an online store where the Golf and Polo models would be available to lease instantly. Instead of the usual Design Thinking way of ideating, prototyping, etc we instead went straight to market with a working service - albeit limited, and not fully scaled up
Two principles were extra important for Volkswagen: First, that we could benchmark the digital store against the normal sales funnel thought dealerships - thus the packaging needed to give equal focus to ”get it online” and ”contact your dealer”. Secondly, that the online shop could not be perceived as competing with the dealerships - and thus needed to incorpoare dealerships in the sales process.
The challenge to get a pilot out in just 6 weeks made it necessary to bring stakeholders from marketing, IT, business development, customer support and finance together to find practical and fast solutions that worked.
We explored white labelling or building on top of a platform like Tictail, but opted to integrate and re-purpose parts we already had: a simple ordering form, a 3rd party customer support app and a lightweight content platform we had built in Wordpress, all integrated into the Volkswagen website. The CRM and sales tool SAMS was integrated behind the scenes so we could tap into pre-existing workflows after the sale happened. It was essential to get the dealerships onboard and not compete against them, so this was also a test of a business model that would allow dealerships to profit too.
The MVP was launched summer 2016 after just- 6 weeks - during the summer we sold 220 cars on the site, which was far above anyone's expectations.
As the pilot was a way to learn, we did a lot of data collection to inform the next steps: In addition to analytics, we conducted qualitative surveys (Usabilla) to gain deeper insight into how our users experienced the concept, and there were in-depth interviews with selected customers who actually bought a car.
Scaling up
Armed with confidence and lessons learned, the Lease Shop was turned into a strategic proper mission to build a scalable product for not just VW but all the brands in the group.
We set up a series of workshops with all the stakeholders to formulate a concept vision as well as requirements - our must-wins and promises.
• Consumers valued clarity and simplicity over configuration options and specifications.
• Test driving the car was less important to this target audience. on test driving the car than in traditional car sales - the VW brand was strong enough to make people trust the quality of the product.
• There was great potential in scaling up the product to more car models and other brands whilst there were obvious design tradeoffs that offered potential for improving the experience through digital signature and better integration of content and storefront.
Hotjar gave insight into how to improve UX
Prototype of a PIM/management tool connected to VWs business system Spider
One of several prototype interaction concepts
”The simplest way to get and own a Volkswagen.”
We aligned on the promise and goal of making the LeaseShop the simplest way of driving a new VW - reducing complexity for the owner in every step of the way - from ownership to buying to service to interaction. This came to be the value proposition for the lease shop on launch with the marketing message of ”3 clicks to a new VW”.
Interactive concepts were prototyped and tested whilst requirements for interfacing with the VW business and product systems were explored, with a lot of attention to what happens "backstage" (aka PIM) and how content, management, customization and interface of the product would make it sustainable and scalable.
The full scale Lease Shop launched in 2017 and has over time evolved and been adopted for Audi, Seat, Skoda as well as the business lease market for both VW and Audi in Sweden.
What started as a an hypothesis and a 6 week pilot ended up digitize a large and growing part of the business that has been celebrated by VW internationally as a prime example of a local market innovation. The work has also been awarded with Guldnyckeln in 2018.
