The majority of Mercedes-Benz customers interact with finance before making a purchase. Finance is the most important element and often undervalued: Cars are, it turns out, much more exciting than finance products.
A customer Interacting with finance multiple times is a key indicator of a customer ready to purchase, even where the sale is finalised at a physical retailer.
Financing a car has a considerable number of steps, all of which have some level of legal regulation, compliance concerns and technical complexity that requires an explanation to the user.
With multiple routes that go from displaying representative offers, through to financing a car fully, it represents one of most complex user experience challenges on the web.
The design team, lead by me, united marketing, financial services, legal and compliance at Mercedes-Benz and the technical team at Publicis Groupé to produce a modular, legally compliant and technically robust finance calculator product. Both the discovery process, and the design itself was focused on users needs based on data and insights we had gathered over multiple years.
We were able to replace the old product entirely and introduce finance options to new areas of the car buying journey, including after they had started a full car buying process and on touch screens at physical retailers.
We were able to store non PII across journeys and sessions allowing users to ‘pick up where they left off’ and modify their finance in new places. This data was also shared with retailers to inform their own sales process separate from ours.
The data gathered represented a more holistic view of how finance was being used. The insights we gathered were also presented regularly to marketing teams to target users with offers in a more specific way.
- Significant* increase in overall usage of the finance calculator
- Finance options were introduced to new areas online and on touchscreens at physical retailers, increasing sales*
- Several improvements in performance* including the number of users required to generate a lead and value of customers for certain models (*NDA)
- Engaging with and supporting legal and compliance at the very beginning allowed us to identify individuals who could champion the work client side as challenges appeared
- The front end and backend updates were updated with users in mind, lead by me, allowed for a highly flexible design
- The interface could be used at various touch points that were often defined by insights gained after release
- Our product design was copied wholesale by BMW, which I consider a compliment.
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