Care By Volvo

Translating a first within the automative industry into a seamless digital experience.

Background…

During 2018 into 2019, I had the great pleasure of working alongside the team at Volvo cars Stockholm whilst employed by AKQA. One of the main products I was placed on was the development of Volvo’s new car subscription service ‘Care by Volvo’ which was at its early stages of an initial launch with the MVP product approaching the first deployment in the German market. My role was to take that MVP and build out the digital delivering for the mobile experience whilst setting out a product vision to support the service.

My Role in this project:

Lead product designer
Collective Strategy

Phase Zero

Understanding the MVP Product

Frame – Create – Scale

Assessing the impact

The team and I went away and conducted multiple forms of research (which included user interviews, market surveys and competitor analysis) within the market, to find out what the needs/desires of the selected audiences are and how they were currently being met.

Methods used to gather insights:

In-App Analytics
Customer Survys/feedback
User testing and interviews

Spotting our opportunties

From the research gathered, we were able to map out the customer journey to visualize key pain points within a customers journey and understand why users were reluctant on committing to a subscription to Care by Volvo.

Phase one

Converting users into subscribers…

Falling in love with Volvo

We found multiple friction points within a users journey that were impacting their commitment to order, Some of these had quick wins such as changing of copy on CTA’s, etc… Some required new features to be designed (alongside a updated UI change to support UX decisions)

With a refreshed UI, we began testing and implementing features to tackle key friction points in the users journey and watched how that impacted the results.

Phase Two

Retaining our customers as active users…

Staying in love with Volvo

In parallel to increasing conversion for subscriptions, we also spotted a massive opportunity to increase retention of users. This was mainly due to there not being any customer value to keep the app and continue their digital experience.

Some of our initial Hypothesis included:

Users want to be able to discover (learn about) their car whilst in the waiting experience
Customers want added benefits and flexibility following their subscription commitment
Customers want a premium service tied to their subscription
Customers want to continue their experience and do not want to install another app to do so

Post-purchase opportunities

Looking at the customer flow, we pinpointed key post-purchase points that we could exploit to provide extra services and features for our users that would aid us in retaining them as users past initial subscription.

What customers want from an App?

Particpants where pulled in from our Care by Volvo beta pool that had signed up to test help improve our products and services, for us to understand what their needs where as drivers. From our 12 – 1 hour interviews we were able to build out a value proposition that addressed our customers’ requirements and desires as day to day users of our service.

Merging existing services

We realised a lot of the functionality our Care by Volvo customers desired were available in our infrastructure but were scattered across multiple mobile apps and web platforms. Our first plan of action was to combine these features into one experience for users which allowed us to scale it for Care by Volvo customers, these features included,

Car controls, Driving records, Route planning, Owner manuals, Subscription upgrades, Onboarding & car education, Concierge service, Upgrade options & Subscription account information

Phase Three

Keeping our users connected…

Living with Volvo

One of Care by Volvo’s main objectives as a service was to create convenience for customers in-order for the drivers to get back time otherwise spent being hassled. With the ever-growing integration of smartwatches in soceity, we dived into how a wearable device could create convenience for our drivers.

We knew for it to work, we would have to keep it simple to the bare necessities our drivers required to be informed of and have control over for them to go about their day without inconveniences, with the aim of looking at your wrist to pre-plan your next journey a new norm.

What was achieved…

We had an initial rapid success with building upon the MVP product, releasing weekly iterations adding user value. The larger post-purchase experience was received well by the organisation and is being carried through into 2020 as a staple of the ‘ownage’ work done within the organisation.

We increased conversion of users subscribing to Care by Volvo from inital download by 39% across live markets

The inital subscribing phase of the app was scaled and launched to a total of 9 markets following MVP market

A solid vison for the app was esthablished which was to be continued into 2020 with support of multiple teams

Client Recommendation

Hardy is a smart, pragmatic designer—who possesses a healthy appetite for resolving customer needs. He is able to deliver value through evidence-based user research practices, acting on new insights to enhance his design output. Hardy is fast in his craft—his execution is always impressive and influential. It should be noted that he doesn’t shy away from abstract strategic thinking, and enjoys looking beneath the surface - to gain the best possible perspective of the problem space and opportunities he is working with. Hardy asks a lot of pertinent questions and always speaks his mind. He has an enduring work-ethic, and will always persevere to get the best possible outcome achieved in less time.

Dan Silver UX Lead Volvo Cars