Intercept Study for Automotive Manufacturer
Benchmarking Visitor Needs, Expectations, and Overall Experience
One of the world's leading auto manufacturers and their interactive agency were charged with making recommendations for how to improve a brand site in the coming year. The OEM and their agency had very little information about their customers' experience on the website. They had questions such as: Who was visiting? What were they seeking? And, most importantly, in what areas were customers' needs not being met? The OEM and their agency asked AnswerLab to assist with an online customer experience benchmark study to answer their burning questions.
Given the mass-market nature of the company's audience, we knew that there would be many different users with widely differing needs and goals, so AnswerLab recommended recruiting a large sample (800 users) through a randomly-shown interstitial invitation on the home page of the website. Respondents answered key questions about their reasons for visiting, continued with their site visits, and then answered post questions about their experience on the website. We collected information about the profile of the visitors, their satisfaction ratings of the site, their consideration and brand impression, and qualitative insights into key problem areas that were driving customers' ratings. This information served as a baseline benchmark of the site prior to a redesign.
The OEM and agency learned from the study that many users did not have an optimized experience while searching and sorting for vehicles. Users did not find and engage with some of the site's tools and with the site's navigation to efficiently and effectively perform searching and sorting for a vehicle of interest. AnswerLab recommended the client focus redesign efforts on the searching and sorting options by improving the placement, messaging, and functionality of the tools available. The client was able to move forward with a better understanding of visitors' needs along with prioritized recommendations to make the website even more relevant and appealing to each use case. AnswerLab also provided the client with baseline data that would ensure that ongoing improvements were measurable against their core business goals.
