Back at the end of 2019, we had already been working with long-time strategic partner JCT600 on a self-serve customer proposition to improve customer experience and operational efficiency of appointments. And then we all know what happened and the proposition instantly had even more product/market fit.
The opportunity to create a self-serve portal came from a period of ethnographic observation across dealer sites in all areas of the business. We spoke to staff and customers across sales and service journeys and mapped the systems and processes that enabled the experiences and where frustrations or opportunities lay.
We ran a series of design sprints to explore the concept of a customer portal; testing in our labs with high fidelity prototypes. Balancing user feedback and business needs we defined the MVP experience that we would roll out in the first release.
The portal essentially serves as a connector of services provided by 3rd party APIs that come together to deliver one overall self serve appointment tool. Our engineers used AWS serverless architecture to optimise performance.
Our Design studio created a refreshed Art Direction for the portal which was then also rolled out to the customer website. Defining design principles, an extended palette and new font ensured the portal looked as good as it was made.
The portal is currently being rolled out in batches and staff trained on the benefits and best practice. Feedback from staff and customers is being fed into the ongoing product development backlog alongside new feature development.
We produced promotional collateral to explain the role of the portal alongside physical retailing changes in providing a Covid safe experience.