circa 2017
Role
As the Head of Design and Research at AutoFi, I own everything design— from the website to our product (responsive web), to customer success stories. I’ve managed 2 designers, and various contractors. I’ve also build processes in place to ensure there were less silos between different business units, and advocated for our customers. These included company-wide weekly design shareouts, brainstorm sessions, offsites, and 1:1s with senior leaders.
My Leadership Pillars
Listen & understand. Identify the needs of my team members and help unblock in anyway I can, whether it’s project based or personal growth/need based.
Fair. Not play favoritism and allow everyone equal opportunities.
Permission to fall. Be understanding that falling/failing is part of the learning process. Everyone is always learning, regardless of age or position.
Accomplishments
I primarily focused on how Design can impact Business, which resulted in:
Retention
20% decrease in churn
Engagement
30% increase
Strategic Influence
Define Persona + Car buying journey
AutoFi— Convenience Economy
AutoFi is a dealership 3rd party lead enrichment tool and real-time lending decisioning tool for car purchase. You can shop for a car, get a payment estimation based on real-time rates from banks, and get a financing or lease offer from a bank in 90 secs. From your couch. How cool is that?
Dashboard Creation (Engagement)
Background
Our Customer success team was having a hard time showcasing our product’s value to customers because there’s no one source of truth internally. It was a major time suck especially in gathering data and data reconciliation with customers. This was a significant trust buster the Head Dealer Success and I thought we should fix. We got together with our CTO and convinced him it was a problem worth fixing.
Dashboard before
What a dealer had access to — an accumulative customer lead list without analytics
Solution
We wanted to deliver key proprietary metrics with our data that would showcase the value of our platform, and create strong engagement with customers. We’ve done 2 rounds of user interviews to identify key metrics and naming convention:
Highlighted key platform metrics with a section around sales to help dealers gauge the follow up process internally.
Results
Increase Customer Success capacity by 40% month over month
Reduced churn by 20% month over month
Increased customer engagement by 50%
F&I Products (Revenue)
Background
F&I products is the most lucrative part of the car business and accounts for roughly $1,600 per vehicle, usually with an F&I manager at the end of a car sale. We were doing about $1,856 per vehicle online, which is a 16% increase. How can we optimize this channel even more?
Before — Single page
Current design, although functional, does not provide much value proposition for buying the product.
There’s also only 1 payment plan presented.
“No Credit Insurance” has the same hierarchy as “Get Credit Life Insurance”
We can only display 3-5 products with this layout, but realized with a better design, we’ll be able to market more products to users without user fatigue.
* This is an overlay window
Understand
The 3 questions we were helping customers understand are:
Why do I need this?
When do I use it?
How does it work?
Redesigned — Menu with tabs
A new menu to categorize products
Key stats to inform purchase
Image to add context
* Images provided by F&I vendors
Detail page
Content-rich details page including video, external links, Q&A and highlights
A sticky nav for pricing plans easy access
Results
10% revenue increase for our customers
5% revenue increase for AutoFi
In-store Product (Strategic)
Assumption
In-store is where 80% of the transactions are captured and not online. It would be a great opportunity for us to get in.
—CEO, CTO, Head of Dealer Success & Head of Lender Success
Background
We have been an online solution for dealerships over the last 3 years. While we have been a great lead-gen tool, most people still do not apply online. Since most transactions still take place in dealerships, we thought that may be a good touchpoint to intercept.
Medium
Web app optimized for tablets
Questions raised
Is this the right time?
Will salespeople use it?
Where can we create the opportunity to bridge the gap?
We found this nugget of opportunity where we realized a drop in customer satisfaction is a reflection of a broken process.
There’s a severe drop in customer experience when the sales person has to go back and forth from the manager’s desk for price negotiation
I recommended to focus on empowering salesmen to present pricing to customers to deliver on customer experience in store:
Comparison feature
This is a feature that is highly coveted but has not been seen on our competitors’ platform. We decided to be the first to market with this.
Compares different financing options and customized payments dynamically across 3 vehicles on tablet screen
Internal Comms
We enabled internal communication between manager and sales person to minimize the back and forth negotiation time.
I have no wiggle room to do what I need to do in store with AutoFi because everything is transparent.
— Sales Manager
I realized the road to adoption is blocked by process change in store with the desire to optimize for haggling. There were also engineering resource constraints that we as a company had to realistic about.
I made the recommendation to punt the in-store product and focus on our lead-enrichment solution. The effort to success is too high right now, and would be worth visiting when we have more scale. Instead, we should focus on educating dealers why more transparency in store is worth it.
Result
5x engagement month over month