Meet the Players

On the Road to Resilience

CDK Global


CDK Global offers digital solutions to the automotive industry. They are facing some challenges. They see market share dwindling in their Dealership Management Systems market space. They notice competitors like Xtime and Salesforce inching into their territory. In efforts to remain competitive, they seek innovative solutions. What can they do to keep others from taking their piece of the pie? CDK Global sought help from our graduate-level Advanced Research class to obtain behavior insights to allow their designers to implement a new digital sales tool.

UT Austin UX Team

UT Austin UX Team We are a group of researchers at UT Austin in the School of Information taking a graduate level advanced research course. Our team consisted of :

  • 3 UX Researchers (I’m one of them)

  • 1 UX Designer

  • Fun Fact about the team ⮕ We all love driving European vehicles

Project Background

CDK’s sales leaders do not understand a car purchaser’s feelings from the beginning of the sales cycle, to the end of their car purchasing experience. They feel that the sales purchasing cycle at a dealership is too long.


Happy Customers = Happy Dealerships = More Sales for CDK

After the stakeholder meeting, I concluded that recognizing satisfied customers leads to increased dealership loyalty, resulting in higher sales, aligning with the overarching goal for CDK to drive business growth through customer satisfaction for dealership success.

Project Goals

  • Help CDK Global shorten the sales cycle with actionable insights

  • Describe steps in the process of purchasing a vehicle from the customer’s perspective 

  • Uncover pain points for the customer during various steps in the sales process

  • Identify customers behaviors at different stages in the purchasing cycle

Challenge # 1

How do you conduct user interviews when you don’t have access to participants?

The stakeholders wanted us to refrain from contacting dealerships or engaging with customers at dealerships.

Challenge # 2

It was hard to find people who had recently purchased a vehicle in the last 24 months.

There was limited inventory due to the pandemic. We were getting our survey completed, but only recruited a few for user interviews. We began to panic!

Solution

Together as a team, we formulated a plan by contacting people on Reddit, Discord & Facebook groups and inquiring with friends & family. When we finally completed 8 user interviews, we felt a heavy weight lift off our shoulders. We were eager to present our findings to Professor Oliver.

Challenge # 3

Falling into the Abyss

When we began conducting our research, we noticed a reoccurring theme that nontraditional buyers were having a better experience, and we wanted to explore that further. We brainstormed this for a while and realized we would need more user interviews. In combing through the rules for the number of participants for this type of study, we realized that we would need at least 8 more user interviews to validate our data and have credible results. 😨

To top it off, we were faced with another assignment for the class. We had two weeks to create a “Teach a Subject” assignment; we also had to recruit and interview 8 more people, synthesize, and present! How are we going to climb out of this deep black hole? 

Overcoming Challenges

What I learned through this experience is that  where there is a will, there is a way.

It felt like I encountered a few hurdles and even stumbled into an abyss, but I managed to find ways to overcome these obstacles.

The New Me

In the end, not only did I feel more confident in my UXR abilities, I also discovered that I can face and conquer any challenge that comes my way. 

Project Timeline : 6 Weeks

  • Stakeholder Meeting - 1 day

  • SWOT Analysis, Secondary Research, Observations- 1 week

  • Survey & User Interview Development - 1 week

  • Pilot Test, User Interviews & Survey Launch- 3 weeks

  • Synthesis & Analysis- 1 week

Screenshots: DCK Global survey, user interviews and dealership observation

Traditional Shopper

As you can tell by our board we took the time to evaluate everything with great detail. All of our insights lived on this board. We had our interview schedule, our journey map iterations, our survey results. This figma board helped us remain organized through out the project.

Figjam Team Brainstorming and Affinity Mapping

Research Insights

All of this work lead us to discover 2 reoccurring themes

Traditional Shoppers (dealership) Vs. Non Traditional Shoppers (online, carmax,etc.)

Non Traditional Shopper

“As soon as we agreed [on price] then it was signing all the papers and running my credit report again, and reaching out to the bank. I mean, that's probably, the worst part of the buying experience because [of] waiting around and having the patience for all of that.”  - P14, Nissan

“Buying the Tesla was super easy. You go online and choose your options and upgrades. Very simple and customizable with no haggling from a sales person.”  - P4 Tesla

We felt these themes would propel the designers to generate actionable items and assist CDK Global shorten the sales cycle and help overcome competitor market share concerns.

Journey Map

Dealership emotions represented with white circles, other shapes represent non traditional buyer emotions

For example, in the Research Section of this map you can see that of our buyers had a negative experience during their car research process.

In the Warranty and Documentation Sections, non traditional buyers (carvana, tesla, carmax) had a much better experience than those who bought at dealerships.

We used this journey map as the bread and butter of our presentation and presented by each section.

Where the Project Stands Now

CDK had launched their new digital tool called, CDK Roadster Express Storefront, which aims to shorten the sales cycle. It also appears that they also applied a suggestion that we made regarding the implementation of an “omnichannel approach”.

Slides from our presentation appendix deck

Next Steps

If I would have had more time to work on this project, I would have loved to have helped design the onmichannel initiative that we recommended in our presentation.

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The Quest for UX Research in a Cultural Institution