The problem
How can we reduce the time it takes for the customer to report and CS to handle a vehicle quality issue, hereby resulting in cost reduction?
The Cazoo CS team were receiving an unexpected amount of vehicle quality issues from customers. The customer complaint process involved a lot of manual handling and costs causing backlogs and customer dissatisfaction, thereby resulting in a low trust-pilot score.
User research • Service design • Iterative UX design • Prototyping • Usability testing • UI design
Context
One of the challenges Cazoo faces is the high number of vehicle quality issues it receives from customers due to the cars being second-hand. Apart from the operations team looking at backstage processes, tech was required to ease the pressure on the CS teams and help them be more efficient.
Active case handling time
296.45
Avg no of interactions per case
21
Average CS cost per case
£143
My role
Help the internal CS team to improve/optimise their processes when dealing with a customer reporting a vehicle quality issue to reduce costs per order.
Vehicle Quality issues (VQI)
The solution discovery
So, I ran a 4 day design sprint with the core team to visualise these problems and ideate on solutions collaboratively.
The objective was to reimagine the post-sale issue notification and info gathering process as currently, this manual process involves multiple teams and the customer is sent back and forth.
The mapping exercise helped identify 7 key stages of the VQI handling process, from which 'Issue notification' and 'Information gathering' were the first customer touch points with several flaws and a key opportunity.
-
Customer finds it difficult to contact Cazoo. They feel anxious about the vehicle quality issue and losing out on their money. The lack of clear timely communication is not reassuring and causes anger and frustration within the customer.
-
CS agents feel overwhelmed with the high workload and number of cases that are open to resolve at a given time. The case-handling process was extremely manual and time-consuming requiring chats over several phone calls and emails to notify and provide evidence.
-
CS agents would manually book repairs over email causing a lot of communication breakdown and errors. CS agents are dependent on third parties such as garages to report back, which can cause a delay in fixing an issue and result in an angry customer.
Design sprint
Design sprint output
The design sprint and blue sky thinking approach generated innovative ideas to the forefront that would allow customers to self-serve and report an issue(s) (see my sketches above):
-
Raise multiple issues on 'My account' and track their progress
-
Upload photo/video evidence of the issue and submit
-
Receive updates and notifications from the CS agent dealing with the case
-
Book/amend repairs with a garage
-
Automatic decline for cases that are not covered by Cazoo
-
Troubleshoot help articles for issues that are not covered or can be fixed easily
User tested prototype from design sprint
The first crucial step for me to take this forward was to understand the VQI CS workflow to establish the problem(s). Therefore, it was essential to bring together the important teams in a collaborative session and map out an end-to-end customer/CS workflow when a vehicle issue is reported.
This helped me identify the problem areas in the process and the different opportunities we have that can help in reducing the time spent on a case and costs per order.
The mapping session was also used to run a empathy mapping activity to get into mindset of a customer and a CS agent facing a post-vehicle issue which helped us map insights to real user needs.
The process
To allow me to dig further into the problem areas, I initiated regular CS shadowing team sessions to help the core team understand the ways a case is raised and dealt with within the Salesforce platform.
I also visited the Southampton call centre to interview CS agents about the process and shadow them dealing with the cases over email and phone.
Listening to call recordings helped to follow existing open cases and processes being followed at the time. Collaborative sessions were held with the stakeholders.
The research
Kirti Devi Ram
© 2023 by kirtiram.co.uk. | Kirti's Portfolio
With that in mind and after multiple rounds of usability testing, we simplified the designs and settled for a self-serve issue reporting tool for customers within my account dashboard to raise multiple issues and upload evidence that CS will automatically receive within the salesforce platform.
This has been released for the first iteration, with a roadmap outlined for future enhancements and capabilities explored in the design sprint such as the garage repairs.
Success metrics
Reported cases
since Sept 2023 launch
654
reduction in case handling time
-28%
Avg no of interactions per case reduced to
11
reduction in post sales cost per order
-£20
The solution - VQI reporting tool
The prototype above from the design sprint was complex and needed further simplification and validation. We found from usability testing that customers were happy with a solution to report an issue but needed it to be quick and much simple without the technical jargon.
