Farie

To better understand customer pain points and optimize internal processes at Farie, I developed a comprehensive Customer Interview Playbook and led the process optimization of the car reservation order. The interview playbook was designed to ensure a structured, consistent approach to gathering customer insights, allowing us to create detailed personas and a value proposition canvas that aligned the company’s offerings with customer needs.

In addition, through participatory design and interviews with stakeholders, we identified and resolved issues in the reservation process where customers were frustrated due to blocked processes. The result was a new, streamlined user journey that improved the reservation process and set clearer expectations for customers.

By integrating customer insights through the interview playbook and improving the reservation system, Farie was able to create a more customer-centric experience that not only improved satisfaction but also aligned with the company’s business goals, leading to an increase in completed transactions, directly impacting Farie’s sales performance.

The challenge for the Customer Interview Playbook was the lack of a standardized approach to gathering customer insights. I created a structured playbook that guided the team through consistent data collection, ensuring that we could reliably extract key insights. This involved crafting both main and follow-up questions designed to uncover the customer’s true needs, as well as developing a customer persona based on the aggregated data.

Additionally, we used the insights to create a value proposition canvas in a workshop, to determine whether Farie’s value propositions aligned with customer expectations. This workshop helped identify gaps in the business’s offering and provided actionable insights for future product development and marketing efforts.

As part of the Customer Interview Playbook, we conducted in-depth interviews with a diverse range of buyers. The collected data revealed distinct patterns in buyer behavior, leading us to define three key customer personas: the Sceptical Online Buyer, the Family-Focused Buyer, and the Convenience-Seeking Buyer.

Each persona was validated through workshops, where we also mapped out customer journeys for each type, comparing their expectations to our existing value propositions. This process allowed us to identify gaps and make necessary adjustments, particularly in our communication strategies and user interface design, to better serve each persona’s unique needs.

The car reservation process posed a different set of challenges. One of the challenge with Farie’s reservation process was that customers who had reserved a car would sometimes delay the process, blocking other interested parties from proceeding with the checkout. This created bottlenecks, leading to frustration among potential buyers who couldn’t reserve the car while waiting for the first customer to decide. The slow process not only decreased customer satisfaction but also resulted in fewer completed sales for Farie.

To address this, I worked with multiple stakeholders and analyzed the customer journey to identify pain points where the reservation process stalled. We implemented a solution that improved the flow by introducing clear time limits and better communication touchpoints. Allowing multiple requests at once and collecting them in a backlog, if a reserved car was not confirmed within a set period, it would be released back to the marketplace, allowing other interested parties to proceed with the purchase.

We created a detailed user flow and identified specific trigger points where actions should be taken, either by the marketing team or directly within the product, to ensure a seamless experience.

Since most of our post-purchase communication was done via email, I worked closely with the Marketing team to ensure that the messaging aligned with the new user journey and directed customers back to our platform to continue the process. This helped maintain consistency in both communication and product experience, resulting in a smoother and faster reservation process for users.

We also improved how we communicated car availability, setting clearer expectations around the next steps and timelines for customers.

Key takeaway

One key takeaway was that we shouldn’t rely solely on quantitative data, as it doesn’t capture the depth of user behavior. Initially, we worked primarily with data and numbers, but we realized this often lacks the context behind why users make certain choices, which leads to an over-generalization of who our customers really are.

By combining the quantitative data with qualitative insights from our customer interviews, we were able to humanize the numbers and gain a deeper understanding, why they choose to buy from us, what they’re looking for in a car or our product, and what they expect throughout the user journey.