In 2020, our client faced three challenges: COVID cancelling in-person dealership visits, parts and chip shortages, and a fragmented shopping experience. During our research, we identified *nine* different online tools needed to find, evaluate, locate, and plan for a vehicle purchase. As a result, the average auto shopper needed to visit 4.2 sites (spending 13 hours!) before visiting a dealership, with each site requiring personal information to view the most important details about a car: its price and availability. It's no wonder four of ten customers would rather get a root canal than shop for a new vehicle. Our brief was clear: increase qualified leads to dealership websites. But we wanted to do more: we wanted to reinvent what it meant to shop for a car—just as we did for books, electronics, and toothpaste— by shortening the time it takes to become a confident buyer, while maintaining customer trust.

Our idea was to rethink the shopping process, streamline the UX, and provide more value in less time with more customer-data controls. Our goal was to create a showroom that takes a customer from zero to dealer quickly and intuitively. Multiple sites would be consolidated into one. Data entry and drop-downs would be replaced by taps and swipes. PII requirements would be replaced by...well, nothing. Simple, elegant, and focused, it would enable broad exploration, becoming more focused as the customer selects their vehicle configuration. It would emphasize financial transparency and education to help customers make the best decisions. Most importantly, it would show the vehicle's actual price, its location, and how to proceed.

We have 224 million monthly active customers, and our client wanted to tap into that demographic. In testing, we identified the single most valuable customer requirement crossing all demographic lines: "Show me a real car, its location, and its price." Fortunately, this is how our digital retail business has always operated, and what our customers expect from it, so they are pre-primed for this experience. Unfortunately, the industry operates differently, so we had to invent that kind of transparent experience from scratch. Combining OEM, dealer, and industry data that was disparate, inconsistent, and often incomplete, our team created a custom data lake, and an API that would feed it, format it, and present it consistently to our customers.

Customers would begin by viewing the brand's vehicle lineup, selecting a model, trim and color. Then, during the customization process, a novel 360-degree interactive viewport allowed customers to see their vehicle update as they made selections. Meanwhile, in the background, vehicles matching those preferences are located, and displayed in real-time using our custom-made API. (At its core, it's a simple real-time visual filtering system.) As customers flipped through the customized results, they could easily view details and features of each vehicle—and most importantly, its actual sticker price, including all options packaged with the vehicle. A financial calculator enabled customers to estimate their potential costs, factoring in sales tax, trade-in value, and their selected financing options. Finally, and only when they chose to, customers could contact dealers directly from our site, requesting more information and/or a test-drive of that exact vehicle.

The experience launched to rave reviews. Customers responded, the press responded—even the stock market responded (the brand’s stock shot up 20% the day the showroom opened). Engagement was 300% to benchmark. Once there, 28% of customers built a vehicle, with a full 20% continuing to the dealership site. 0% of customer data was shared automatically with dealerships, resulting in 0 spam email and 0 spam calls. By 2021, the brand had shot to #5 on the Automotive Brand ranking list, and is currently ranked #36 among ALL global brands. Our program cannot take all the credit, of course. However, our focus on the customer experience, safeguarding their private data, and how we put the power back into their hands by supplying them with real—and real-time—information, contributed to that growth. For once, the OEM, the dealer groups, and the customers all agree: we are on the right track.