AUTOSCOUT24.DE
Customer Journey Innovation
USER
RESEARCH
CUSTOMER
JOURNEY
DESIGN
THINKING
A system for innovating along the customer journey
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Autoscout24, the largest online car marketplace in Europe, saw the need to make their service more innovative and unique. Their challenge to us design-thinkers was to identify new areas of potential growth along their customer journey and coach a process to their team to become more innovative themselves.
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At Autoscout24, the design and innovation teams were mainly stuck in the day-to-day routine of optimising their service, a platform for selling used cars. Additionally, the understanding of customer needs, pain points and behaviours was fragmented and diverse.
Our design thinking process started out by consulting stakeholder interviews and observations, both, in house and with customers. In our interviews with employees it became apparent that the various teams at Autoscout24 had different views on how customers used their service. Our in-home user observations revealed specific pain points and insights when their customers used their service.
"An effective way to understand your customers better, is working with the customer journey. It spans all touch-points of a customer, describing the individual transactions with a product or service. Successful brands develop a seamless and appealing end-to-end experience interconnecting these various touch-points."
Anne Schlösser, Partner
Tangible results from a customer journey project
In order to best visualise and utilise our research findings, we worked by describing the discovered needs, pain points and opportunities for innovation and improvements along the user journey of the platform.
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Additional to presenting Autoscout24’s digital customer journey on a 2D map or in a digital format, we chose a more immersive way: We built a “Customer Journey Experience Space” which made the digital customer journey tangible in all its details.
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Together with the teams we uncovered a whole range of unmet needs and new potential for Autoscout24. In our evaluation the leadership team gained clarity on priorities for innovation and differentiation along the user journey of the service. Major process improvements were realized consequently and are helping Autoscout24 to keep its leading position in the market.