Volkswagen x Tribal DDB
An epic Aussie road trip
Volkswagen, a global leader in the automotive industry, is renowned for its iconic models like the Beetle, Golf and Camper Van. In 2019, following the launch of a new corporate identity, they initiated a global digital transformation aiming to create a consistent modernised brand experience.
Agency
Role
Experience Design, UI Design, Content Design, Art Direction
Year
2019-2023
Project Type
Digital Transformation, E-Commerce, CX Optimisations, Website Design, Integrated Campaigns
As part of its global digital transformation roll-out in Australia, Volkswagen partnered with Tribal DDB Australia to revamp its online customer experience. Our immediate goal, alongside other partners and agencies, was to create a new website utilising the global CMS component library and redesign several local lead generation and servicing tools.
Over the following three years, our continued collaboration transformed Volkswagen into a multimillion-dollar online sales platform, enhanced brand and retail experience, and helped the business place the customer at the heart of its operations.
New Volkswagen brand website designs.
Role & Contributions
As a Senior Experience Designer at Tribal, I contributed to over 70 digital projects for Volkswagen and played a pivotal role in reshaping the customer experience.
My journey began by supporting our Managing Director/CX Lead, but it didn't take long before I took on leadership roles, initiating and managing projects and teams in CX optimisations, design updates, new builds, and the localisation of the global design system. Additionally, I supported new product and service launches, integrated campaigns, and CRM workstreams.
My responsibilities expanded beyond my initial CX role, including UI work and content design, while continuously improving the work processes. With an in-depth knowledge of the site structure, content, customer journeys and brand language, I played a CX custodian role, reviewing nearly every website update for over three years.
This case study features the most impactful of my 70+ Volkswagen projects.
Context
In Australia, Volkswagen offers a range of vehicles, from compact cars to SUVs and commercial vehicles. Customers can choose between custom ordering or selecting from available stock.
To facilitate payments, they can trade in their old vehicle and secure a car loan through Volkswagen Finance. Every purchase or service request ultimately involves interaction with the extensive dealership network. They own the vehicle stock and play a critical role in the customer experience.
Ultimately, our key business goal was to ensure that every customer interaction on the website was leading to clear, measurable KPIs.
Challenge
To meet the business needs, we were set to enhance the digital brand experience with emotion while ensuring strong lead generation for dealers and a streamlined path to sales. Simultaneously, we had to address a growing customer disengagement with dealerships.
As we began the website redesign in late October 2019, Volkswagen was still dealing with the aftermath of the 2015 emission scandal, impacting the brand's reputation. Customer satisfaction ratings were low, and there was a prevalent perception of high vehicle maintenance costs.
The global Volkswagen rebranding was vital, and today, this brand change project is known as one of the world's largest. It was completed in a record nine months across 161 market organisations. In our case, we had a mere four months until the website's launch date.
Team Tribal running workshops at the Volkswagen Group Australia Head Office.
Our Approach
Given the tight deadline, our strategy involved lean research, relying on comprehensive documentation from Volkswagen and input from our data and SEO partners at PHD Media, Resolution Digital and Annalect. We aimed to kickstart aggressive optimisations and tests post-launch.
Volkswagen's new digital experience principles evolved through research and client workshops.
Our initial efforts included a thorough audit of existing content and features. Combined with global guidelines and local market requirements, it informed our new experience strategy, customer journey, and information architecture.
We created templates for Adobe Experience Manager CMS-based pages utilising global components and clarified requirements for the locally built tools, ensuring a balance between brand continuity and local relevance. After a series of workshops, we devised a sprint-based content migration plan.
The new Volkswagen sitemap was created in close collaboration with the stakeholders and approved by the global HQ. Given the diverse brand offerings, we grouped content and features in alignment with customer lifecycle stages.
Design
Working closely with product and legal teams, we refreshed all website copy and imagery and delivered hundreds of new AEM-based pages, including over 20 unique product pages.
In parallel, we redesigned a few custom local applications like the test drive booking tool and dealer locator, collaborating closely with our development and automation partner, Katzion.
As we catered to various target audiences, we further tailored content structures within the predefined product page templates.
Changing Roles
Midway through the project, unforeseen circumstances required me to take charge of the project production while concurrently handling the UX and content design.
This involved overseeing a team of a content producer, a copywriter, and two visual designers to ensure the project stayed on course for timely delivery. I was also responsible for preparing the UI design pack for the development handover, marking my first experience delivering UI designs.
New Volkswagen Online Order tool designs.
Radical Turnover
We launched the new brand site the night before Sydney's initial COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020. The pandemic's constraints and sales uncertainties prompted rapid online shopping initiatives.
Tribal further helped Volkswagen to launch an online vehicle ordering tool in April, leading to the sale of 433 new vehicles, valued at around $26 million within the first six months. The website attracted 2.4 million visits, and dealer callback requests tripled compared to 2019.
Post-Launch Optimisations
The launch of the website and the online vehicle ordering tool marked just the beginning of a continuous series of CX optimisations and comprehensive experience mapping efforts.
Identifying common customer behaviours and assessing performance before and after the launch became challenging due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, the data tracking became fragmented due to post-launch backend improvements.
Customer experience mapping at home office during lockdown.
Our customers entered the website from various touchpoints, regularly influenced by new campaigns, social activities, and offers. Furthermore, a global microchip shortage affected custom vehicle delivery dates, followed by vehicle stock shortages in Australia and a surge in second-hand car sales.
The graph shows the connections between the top 174 pages on the Volkswagen website post-launch.
While mapping the end-to-end experience, the website traffic data revealed dispersed user journeys with no apparent patterns or clusters and the local tools requiring further realignment due to ongoing market disruptions.
Volkswagen customer lifecycle journey mapping.
Following a series of quick fixes, we launched a long-term project to enhance the connectivity of these tools and develop new solutions to bridge larger gaps in the customer experience.
We organised our post-launch research into four core themes with corresponding optimisation initiatives to help us better connect customer experiences.
Harnessing the Traffic
By analysing the customer journey, we found an opportunity to simplify vehicle selection within the wide Volkswagen range, tailored to customer preferences, circumstances, and budget.
As much as 60% of our users were unsure about the model choice at the start of their journey and generally browsed multiple vehicles, unguided. Due to the backend complexities, migrating a popular Car Finder tool designed to do just that proved challenging.
At the same time, our SEO partners at PHD and Resolution identified content gaps within vehicle categories. As a cost-effective solution, we introduced a series of engaging category pages based on vehicle types and customer lifestyle choices like 'Family Cars'. These pages have since become the primary source of web traffic to a range of key product pages.
My latest 2023 content refresh of the Volkswagen SUV Range page for the "Isn't it time you SUVW" campaign launch. The challenge is always to keep the right balance of emotive campaign messaging and informative content to guide the users and ensure quality leads. The page is one of the most popular landing pages on the website.
Mastering Product Pages
With more complete data from Google Analytics, Salesforce, and heatmaps available, we could make more informed decisions regarding product page structure and content.
However, ongoing global site functionality updates and market fluctuations affecting the demand and supply for various models posed persistent challenges, which we successfully navigated by mid-2021 with a page template consistent for all vehicles. The result is increased page engagement and goal completion across passenger and commercial vehicles.
One of the latest 2023 product page updates for the Volkswagen T-Roc. The most significant product page improvements included featuring essential vehicle USPs at the top of the page for quick customer assessment, strategically reducing interactive elements such as accordions and carousels to combat engagement fatigue, grouping crucial purchasing features to streamline decision-making, and transforming end-of-page CTA cards into a simplified list of links after discovering that most users were skipping them in favour of the footer.
Setting Records in Online Pre-Sales
In mid-2020, I contributed to the UX and UI design of a new e-commerce solution enabling customers to pre-order vehicles before the official launch. All 30 limited edition California Beach camper vans were sold out within 9 hours.
2020 Launch
2023 Evolution
The Online Pre-Order solution designs have since been optimised and applied to various models, including the latest exclusive version of one of the most sought-after cars in the country, Golf R 20 Years, where all 50 cars were sold out within just 30 minutes of orders opening in July 2023.
Simplifying Online Finance
To simplify customers' understanding of Volkswagen car loan products and support their online ordering journey, we were tasked with creating an online finance pre-approval tool integrated within the online retail solutions.
My goal was to design a user-friendly solution that streamlined the selection and customisation of financial offers based on personal preferences and selected vehicles. For this project, I crafted both the UX and UI components.
The designed Online Finance solution guided customers to the online application on Volkswagen Financial Services' platform, reducing the paperwork completed at dealerships while serving as a user-friendly finance calculator for prospective buyers.
Advancing Online Retail
In October 2020, backed by data-driven insights, we initiated a project to redesign the Retail Stock Locator and Offers website sections, intending to increase leads and online sales, all while standardising inconsistent backend data.
Collaborating closely with Katzion, I played a central role in developing comprehensive logic and designing our new filtering feature, enabling customers to easily search for all available vehicle stock across the Australian dealership network.
Overseeing the design work, I helped develop an extensive local UI library, simplifying pricing and finance details often complicated by numerous legal disclaimers. Having integrated multiple purchasing tools, we streamlined the customer purchasing journey and reduced drop-offs.
The redesigned customer flow from offers to stock enquiry.
Furthermore, I actively contributed to behavioural-based optimisations in collaboration with the data and CRM agency Track DDB and Volkswagen's global BBO partner, SmartDigital, to advance our online retail solutions and personalise the customer journey.
An example of behavioural-based optimisations developed to streamline and personalise the online shopping experience.
Boosting Multimillion Aftersales Success
In collaboration with the Volkswagen Aftersales team, I led a few UX and UI design projects to increase owner engagement with post-purchase services and products and address the perception that the vehicles were unreliable and expensive to service. Our most stellar effort was the Volkswagen Care Plans e-commerce solution, leading to multimillion-dollar success in less than three years.
Initially, the Care Plans were offered only at dealerships, and despite substantial savings offered by these 5- and 3-year servicing packages to new or nearly new Volkswagen owners, the penetration rate remained low. My task was to design a product page with a seamlessly integrated e-commerce solution and revise customer journeys across the website.
Volkswagen Care Plans user flows were created in close coordination with developers and are driven by comprehensive data points.
After mapping the user flows, I handled the UI designs, enabling the identification of customer vehicles, selection of the right product option and payment, and linking all these details to the vehicle ID in the entire Volkswagen database.
The original Volkswagen Care Plans e-commerce UI designs. We further enhanced the solution by integrating new service package options and designing a standalone Care Plan Pricing Guide tool to guide the undecided users to purchase.
Over the years, we successfully integrated other service offerings to cover various customer segments and needs, like 4Plus Care Plans and Essential Servicing for older vehicles, Used Car Check for buyers and sellers, ServiceXpress for customers in a rush, and ServicePlus for business owners. Additionally, I helped optimise content and information architecture to enhance the overall ownership experience.
Integrating 4Plus Care Plans offerings into the Service Pricing Guide tool helped enhance owner's enagement by 6%.
Enhancing Dealer Experience
In the latter stages of my involvement in Volkswagen's CX optimisation journey, our cross-functional team focused on improving website forms and user data management. Our primary goal was to generate more high-quality leads for dealerships and enhance overall customer experience.
Many critical tools assisting customers throughout their journey, such as finding and contacting dealerships, booking test drives and servicing, and getting trade-in valuations, have remained unchanged since the website's launch in 2020.
Our main challenge revolved around the one-way lead data flow toward dealerships, limiting access to enriched data for further improvements, including personalisation.
Our key focus areas identified during a series of one-on-one interviews with Volkswagen dealerships.
Leading an in-depth research, I helped uncover insights that sparked new initiatives and improved the overall site experience. Despite increasing customer disengagement with dealerships, up to 70% of customers adjusted their vehicle choices based on dealer conversations, with over 50% of test drives leading to purchases.
To address the findings, we optimised the forms to balance data collection with enhanced customer benefits. I created wireframes and detailed prototypes, and while supervising the UI efforts, I helped push the boundaries of our localised design library to improve engagement and form completion.
New Volkswagen Test Drive Request Form wireframes were designed to allow customers to select up to two vehicle options and enhance the dealer conversation. View live.
New Volkswagen Dealer Enquiry Form wireframes were designed to capture more customer data without disrupting the backend data flows.
New Volkswagen Trade-in Evaluation Form wireframes were designed to capture accurate customer contact details with an option to opt in for further dealership communication. View live.
Campaign Work
In addition to crafting campaign journeys to streamline delivery and unify multiple work streams and customer touchpoints for DDB-wide projects, I also contributed to several integrated campaigns that achieved impressive results.
The new campaign journeys incorporated all new product launch stages and associated campaign activities across various digital touchpoints.
Golf GTI Ad Break Championship
I actively participated in crafting the user experience and campaign journeys for the Golf GTI Ad Break Championship. This campaign led to a 436% increase in dealer call-back requests, a 97% surge in stock inquiries, and a 725% boost in test drive requests. During the active campaign period, Golf sales soared by 55%, marking it as the most successful GTI launch.
Golf GTI Ad Break Championship hype reel.
Amarok Walkinshaw Station
For the Amarok V6 W-Series launch, a collaborative venture between Volkswagen and renowned performance tuning house Walkinshaw, I contributed to the campaign journeys, the digital concept and wireframes for the bespoke Walkinshaw Station experience website. This campaign achieved exceptional results, with 48 vehicles sold online within a mere six minutes of the online presale.
Amarok Walkinshaw Station Campaign: Reared for the Road.
A Legacy of Impact
Volkswagen's digital transformation journey is a testament to collaboration, innovation, and relentless pursuit of excellence. Despite challenges, including navigating the COVID-19 pandemic, we reshaped the online retail and brand experience, increasing customer trust and turning the website into a multimillion-dollar sales platform.
Through ongoing data tracking, testing, and SEO reviews, I've deepened my understanding of the design and content decisions' impact on customer behaviour, enriched my automotive industry expertise and forged enduring and trusted relationships with clients and partners.
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Let's talk
I’m open to new opportunities, so please feel free to reach out.
© Natalia Esakova-Owen, 2023