Test Drive Booking Funnel

Introduction

Once a customer finds a car in Shift’s inventory that they’re interested in, they can schedule a test drive appointment online. In this appointment, a Shift employee drives the car out to the customer’s house, conducts the test drive, and can complete the purchase in the customer’s driveway.

The test drive booking process works as a funnel, and the performance of that funnel is critical to Shift’s business.

How it worked

When I started working on the funnel, it was a simple booking flow that asked the customer for their contact info, their location, and their desired time for the test drive. The sales team then followed up with a phone call to better understand the customer’s needs and qualify them. If they determined that the customer wasn’t likely to buy (for example, they had no clue how they would pay for the car), they could postpone the test drive.

Setting goals

As part of our “buyer experience” pod, our mandate was simple: sell more cars! We measured this through overall buyer conversion: from visitors to cars sold.

Discovery and Design sprint

We started off by trying to understand, “what is stopping people from booking a test drive and buying a car?” Through quantitative analysis, we saw that every step of the funnel was leaky, so I organized and ran a design sprint to better understand what was happening.

We learned from our sales and operations teams that customers were frequently unprepared to buy at the end of their test drive. The most often-cited reasons were that they were still shopping or needed more time to line up payments. Our sales team shared a critical insight that they were spending all day on these follow-up calls qualifying customers!

In the design sprint, we prototyped and tested a brand new funnel that not only helped customers book their appointment, but also qualified and prepared them for their upcoming test drive.

Final designs

Funnel template and breadcrumbs: to help give users a sense of place and progress and build tighter alignment with the user’s “job to be done,” booking a test drive. I worked closely with the rest of the design team to generalize this new funnel template so we could use it across Shift’s product experience in our other funnels.

Choice cards: I introduced a new component that I called “choice cards” to more clearly explain complicated actions that couldn’t easily be condensed into a single button. They also worked better than standard buttons when there were 2-4 equally-weighted options for the customers to consider.

Animations: I worked closely with an engineer to really polish up the details and sprinkle in some delight through animations. The screen transitions also helped give a sense of movement and build momentum through the funnel.

Results

Interestingly, we saw the number of booked test drives decline by 30%, which was a scary start to the experiment. We made up that ground with 20% more customers entering the funnel and a 15% improvement in purchase conversion on the test drive.

In total, we saw our end-to-end conversion of visitor to car sold improve by 10%. With fewer, higher-converting, test drives, our sales team was spending less time on the phones with unqualified customers.

What I would do differently

Phase the work: as we learned more about the test drive process, the scope of the project grew. For example, we made additional improvements to the car detail page to entice customers to enter the booking flow. This ended up giving huge gains in conversion, but we could have launched those improvements separately to de-risk the project and pull forward incremental gains.

Deeper online qualification: even though conversion was up, we weren’t truly replacing the sales team. They were still able to qualify customers better than the online system. To save them even more time, we could have dug deeper to better understand their process and replicate that in the product.

Want to learn more?

Contact me for a more detailed case study.