Delighting Our Customers: The Journey to Exceptional User Experience at carwow

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

🚗 At carwow, we’re on a mission to provide total confidence to customers when they buy and sell their cars. We are constantly looking for ways to improve our product and create an exceptional user experience.

Last year, I spent quite a lot of time thinking about Customer delight. The main reason is that our designers, product managers, and product leadership (including our CEO) agree we’ve built a good functional product, but there’s more we can do to delight customers. I wondered why and what can we could do to fix it.

I spent some time talking to colleagues and coaches, and reading about the topic (worth reading this article from Marty Cagan), but I wasn’t very satisfied with the answers, so we decided to follow our Product Principles and Start with a clearly defined problem. Recently, my team and I ran a workshop to explore this topic. In this article, I’ll share with you what we learned, our plan forward, and some actions that we have already taken.

What is customer delight (for us)?

During the workshop, we thought about moments of delight and frustration in different products (digital and physical) and tried to come up with a definition. Two great examples were:

• One of our PMs thought that Trainline worked for him by providing amazing recommendations on how to save money and/or time on train trips. The app delivered well above his initial expectations providing delight
• Other PMs complained massively about how passwords create a horrible and frustrating experience for users

After reviewing our own definition, we decided to borrow Hubspot’s definition as we thought it articulated quite well what we wanted to say:

Customer delight is the process of exceeding a customer’s expectations to create a positive experience with your product or brand. Delight is about providing a remarkable experience to users by focusing on their needs, interests, and wishes

Why didn’t we prioritise this in the past?

During our workshop, we identified several reasons why we hadn’t prioritised customer delight before. The main themes were:

1. Metrics & incentives: We optimise for conversion metrics (normally within a short period of time), not focusing on customer delight or happiness metrics. Due to the nature of our product (infrequent transactions), it’s difficult to measure NPS and retention as a leading indicator of business value
2. Culture: Culturally, we usually follow an 80/20 rule, capturing 80% of the value and not doing the extra work that is normally harder, but potentially delivers more customer delight. The reason for this is that due to the size of the opportunity for carwow and our limited resources, there is a very high opportunity cost vs. working on other potential areas
3. Not enough depth of knowledge and customer empathy: Driven by our lack of resources, we don’t have enough product teams to cover well the different parts of our experience and get the right level of depth of customer knowledge and empathy. Additionally, due to the infrequent nature of our product, it makes it more difficult to dogfood

What is our plan going forward?

There are always reasons out of our control that make it difficult to move forward. In this case, we wanted to focus on those things that we, as product managers, could actually progress and influence other parts of the organisation.

Based on the themes that emerged during our workshop, we’re taking the following actions to increase customer delight:

What have we done so far?

We have made quite a bit of progress in the last few months. Two examples of things especially relevant have been:

• Product principles revision: We crafted the first draft of our Product Principles 3 years ago. Next month we will be rolling out a revision, increasing the prominence and importance of customer and dealer delight in the way we approach building products at carwow. If you want to learn more about our Product Principles, check out my previous blog on this here.
• More time for user research: we have created a new section in our bi-weekly product demo led by our amazing User Research Lead, Sarah(Team Curious). In this section, she covers some of the main things she has learned from user testing sessions, interviews, or surveys
• Documentation: We have adapted the documentation of our bi-weekly product reviews to have Customer Delight more top of mind in our conversations. We are planning to do the same in other parts of our documentation stack (e.g. epic and experiment write-ups)

• Customer & Partner Love sprint: We ran our First Customer & Partner Love Sprint at carwow. This one-a-week sprint focused on those small things that are difficult to prioritise but have a relevant impact on customer experience. This was inspired by this article written by the design team at Slack. It was really interesting, so we’ll write a specific article on it soon.

We’re excited to be taking these steps to improve the customer experience and create a more delightful product for our users. We’ll be sharing more updates on our progress in the coming weeks and months, so stay tuned! 🚘💻🔥

P.S If you are interested in learning more about how we do product at carwow, you can check out some of our previous blogs here https://medium.com/carwow-product-engineering/tagged/product.