Volkswagen - Buy back experience review
Current State Assessment
We were asked to quickly assess and define improvement areas with Volkswagen Australia's current Buy back process.
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Category:
Research, CX, Creative problem solving workshop
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About this project
Volkswagen Australia was facing bad reputation because of the painful Buy back process they've put in place and the brand was heavily suffering financially with the loss of sales.
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Buy back policy is offered up to a certain time for all new car owners by Australian Consumer Law. New car owners can request a buy back to get their money back or get a replacement if there is a manufacture problem with their new car. Volkswagen requested to understand fully the current Buy back process and apply quick improvements for a more streamlined experience for them and for their clients.
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The Goal
The goal was to create common understanding of the current buy back process.
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Define the pain points and improvement areas on an end-to-end customer journey.
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Find new ways of working efficiently internally but also with the dealers, employees and the customers.
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Challenges and Approach
The challenge was to fully understand how each party was applying the new Buy back policy that was put in place recently. As part of the discovery phase, I have conducted stakeholder interviews, customer interviews, listened to the customer service records and read customer complaints.
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During the interviews, I found out that different parts of the business were working in silos and not communicating with each other during the buy back process. The entire process was lacking some basic rules therefor it was a painful experience for customers but also for dealers who may apply their own rules in order not to loose their commissions.
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It was necessary to gather all the stakeholders at a workshop to share our findings and create alignment. We started to develop "Our understanding" of the current buy back process on a customer journey highlighting different parties, channels, overlaps and gaps to share and validate at the workshop.
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On the workshop day we started by sharing a customer complaint recording to set the scene. That was powerful enough to make everyone aware of the urgency of the matter. The workshop was planned with "Creative problem solving" framework where we prepared 8 Group activities throughout the day until the final validation of the current buy back experience.
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We collected comments and corrections from different stakeholders on the current experience and defined together improvement areas.
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After agreeing on the improvement areas, we suggested short, mid and long term initiatives along with an action plan for Volkswagen stakeholders to give them direction..
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Successful Outcomes
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Created alignment with the stakeholders on the current state buy back experience.
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Defined improvement areas and suggested new ways of working.
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Created vision for future state buy back policy.
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Volkswagen gained improved efficiency through collaboration, process automation and by defining governance.
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