Imagine a brand new, nationwide subscription service delivered for the UK’s leading online car retailer in under five months. That’s what we achieved in collaboration with Cazoo. Injecting value into both the designing and delivery of its services, whilst progressing its mission to offer the most comprehensive car buying experience in the market.
Cazoo wanted to build on its rapid growth, stay ahead of the competition and fill a gap in the market for consumers by entering the subscription space, which has itself been rapidly growing in recent years. Its offering is flexible, all-inclusive and perfectly aligned with the demands of the modern consumer.
Designing the end-to-end journey for Cazoo's new car subscription service
Cazoo
Designing the end-to-end journey for Cazoo’s new car subscription service
At a glance
- Outcome-driven: A brand new subscription-orientated CX that is integrated with Cazoo’s existing infrastructure to accelerate go-to-market for the UK
- Speed to value: A fully marketable, subscription offering achieved in only five months after Cazoo’s first subscription acquisition
- Customer-centric: A service blueprint, orientated around the customer as well as the business operations and processes, that visualised the end-to-end subscription experience and aligned everyone, pinpointing all gaps, risks and opportunities for Cazoo
Cazoo is a rapidly growing, customer-obsessed company that needs many people to be working together on the same priorities to deliver great service. Kin + Carta helped us establish the practice of service design by visualising what we wanted to achieve to meet end-to-end customer needs. This joined-up view allowed us to work together to make this new proposition happen - all on what was a rather tight deadline.
Katherine Hurst Customer Experience Director, Cazoo
Meeting the growing demand for convenience and simpler budgeting
Cazoo’s own research found that almost a third of UK consumers are interested in subscribing to a car rather than financing or buying outright. It’s a phenomenon that’s aligned with a growing demand for subscription services in general; 21% of respondents also said they had amassed more monthly subscriptions than they had before the pandemic, with 44% citing convenience and 25% highlighting money-saving as the main reasons behind their purchasing decisions.
The company endeavoured to develop a service that aligned with these behaviours and allow consumers not only the flexibility to switch cars more often, but also the ability to pay for everything in a single monthly payment, from insurance and maintenance to servicing and road tax.
This was the task at hand for Kin + Carta, but it was, crucially, influenced by a rapid shift in business momentum. Cazoo acquired leading subscription services, Drover and Cluno, to accelerate its own go-to-market service in the UK and simultaneously step into other countries across Europe, too.
Integrating with existing processes to maintain five-star customer experience
With these acquisitions, Cazoo gained extensive domain expertise and new complex infrastructure, so it had to rapidly devise a way to adapt and align its own established experience with a new subscription proposition. It had to consider the whole service provision - including people, products, processes, physical environments, partnerships, operations, organisation, digital and underlying technology - in order to take a class-leading subscription offering to market for consumers who demand convenience and flexibility.
We worked extremely closely with Cazoo’s teams to devise an end-to-end, online and offline service, from mapping the current state of the service offered by Drover to co-creating and redesigning key moments of the journey. We moved from ideation to service delivery by bringing to life touchpoints and defining how customer service agents would interact with the customer at key stages of the journey, such as a pre-delivery call or to answer payment queries.
We engaged with different delivery teams (product engineering, legal, finance, CS, CRM and others) to zoom in at specific sections, design step by step and sweat out the details.
Sweating the small stuff
There was no need to start from scratch, but there were many nuances and intricacies to consider when it came to developing the integrated strategy behind this new subscription service.
Cazoo needed an effective way to communicate with all the different layers of the organisations involved in the delivery of the service roll-out and an efficient way to reduce siloed decisions and streamline workflows. The new subscription service was centred on customer needs, with a necessity to be compliant and legal, and aligned with Cazoo’s existing tech structure.
As the “eyes and ears” of the new proposition, we identified the gaps that needed filling to deliver an exemplary experience and provide a zoomed-out view of how every element of that experience was connected together (and, indeed, what knock-on effects might occur from individual tweaks to the service).
A detailed understanding of user needs and business pain points and co-creation sessions with relevant stakeholders meant we could understand the as-is state and pinpoint ways in which the company needed to adapt to deliver an optimised experience.
We redesigned prioritised stages of the service and zoomed in to work on the details with multiple delivery teams, including product engineering, legal, finance, CS, CRM and more. We explored different solutions on how to tackle the identified problems, taking into consideration customer needs, employee ways of working and tech/system capabilities. We considered and identified many different scenarios, including happy and unhappy paths, and made sure that Cazoo would be ready to provide the service.
When designing the end-to-end journey, we had to consider edge case scenarios, such as debt collection, traffic fines, accidents and incidents.
Once we established the changes and the journey had been reviewed, we partnered with the content design team and the frontline staff to revise and write process guidelines, policies, scripts and FAQs.
Delivering a blueprint for success
Leading on an end-to-end approach to service design from the outset meant we could co-create and deliver a customer experience that would allow Cazoo to capitalise on surging demand in the UK.
The blueprint we implemented mapped the journeys, processes and operations for all actors and instilled connected thinking with a customer centric view. It is now a source of truth for all relevant teams and a valuable asset for Cazoo to take forward, refine and iterate as it onboards new people and builds awareness of the service.
Service Design at Kin + Carta
“At Kin + Carta, we help our clients embrace a service design mindset by creating a bird’s-eye view of the entire experience and understanding how the different layers of the organisation can work towards the same objectives. We navigate the complexity of these layers together across multiple disciplines to devise and deliver a service that is laser-focused on the end-user experience.”
Would you like to know more? Reach out to Mariana, one of our service design experts.
