Silvercar - Admin Operations Platform

The operations platform gives team members the capabilities to manage members, inventory, markets, customer swap requests and cancellations.

This was an internal tool to be used by Silvercar team members.

Business Problem

Without an operations platform, Silvercar by Audi team members would have split their time between providing a solid concierge experience and manually managing paperwork.

Besides this ultimately overtime becoming an abrasive process for both Silvercar consumers and employees. But the mismanagement of legal paperwork could result in legal disputes over time.

Product Importance & Impact

The operations platform give Silvercar by Audi team members the ability to manage members, inventory, markets, swap request, and cancellations. By moving this process online, team members can spend more time building customer relationships and providing a solid concierge experience.

Initial Hypothesis

Work with Silvercar and Audi stakeholders to research and design a platform that would allow Silvercar team members to…

View member billing details, member agreements, background checks, and see if the member is active or inactive.
Drill into customer details to manage swap requests, contracts, addresses, driver license details, and member cancellations.
View vehicle inventory, assign vehicles to specific members, and view specific markets.

The Users

Silvercar team members and executives. However, this trickles down and effects Audi’s current consumer demographics which are 70% college graduates, 60% married, 20% households with children, 40 years median age, a $100,000 median household income, 70% male owners, and 30% women owners.

User Benefit

Users will receive a better concierge experience. Silvercar team members would focus on nailing the detailed concierge experiences such as helping users through the registration process, special vehicle requests, and vehicle and swap deliveries.

My Role

Product Design, User Experience Design

The first half of this project was spent conducting user interviews with stakeholders and Silvercar team members. I then decided it would be best if we created an operations-specific service blueprint that uncovered the entry and pain points for team members. From there I sketched, designed, and prototyped the dashboard while seeking out feedback from team members and stakeholders.

Client

Silvercar by Audi

The Design Team

Myself / Design Manager — James U.

Discovery: Understand Users & Setting Goals

I wanted to understand the trends that set the standards for the car rental industry. By taking this approach, I knew that I could also learn and understand how team members worked day to day, and used their current software to interact with customers.

Research Goals:

Understand customer needs when renting a vehicle or interacting Silvercar team members. Do customers have special requests? Can special requests even be fulfilled? How do you resolve customer complaints or questions, online or on-paper?
Understand how tech-savvy Silvercar team members are, if the platform is complex, are team members trained? Is there only a designated member that’s allowed to use the platform?
Understand Silvercar team member’s behavior when handling vehicle. How do team members handle inventory right now?
Learn about the biggest pain points for team members when working with customers. How many customers do they tend to engage with per hour?
Learn about what drives Silvercar team members when engaging with customers.

Research: Service Blueprint

To help us identify current gaps in the user experience, we created a service design blueprint. Through this exercise, we identified new entry points for the operations platform.

Interviews: Silvercar Members / Stakeholders

I delved deeper and conducted 5 in-person interviews with Silvercar members and stakeholders to get insights and uncover pain points. I gained some interesting takeaways…

Assumptions:

Mailers: Mailers could serve as a solid alternative for plan members who could not receive emails for whatever reason.

Insights (Day to Day with Silvercar):

Concierge and efficiency we’re viewed as top priorities when working with Silvercar customers and there was an expectation that this would be carried through.
Customers often had special requests and needs.

Needs:

Design Efficiency: Team members overwhelmingly stressed efficiency as the initial Silvercar process made this the forefront and team members wanted to make sure that this mentality through design would be carried through.
Customer Management: Team members hoped to get away from having to store paperwork for both registration, cancellations, and swap requests.
Scheduler Feature: A feature that would coordinate. Although this feature was tabled due to time and scheduled for version 2. I still went ahead and designed a rough version, I’ve added it to the images below.

Sketching & Wireframes

I began by sketching the operations dashboard to get an understanding of how we could design a dashboard that allowed team members carry out quick and efficient tasks. After a couple rounds of design I began to test the prototype with Invision and seek out team member feedback.

In the first version team members were having issues with the following: The customer profile screen felt cluttered and information presented were confusing without labels. In response, I revamped the customer profile screen and broke tasks and information into sub-pages.

Information Architecture

Prioritizing the main features of Audi select, it was important to convey how those needs could equally be met by team members. After talking with team members and stakeholders, it was clear that customer management, inventory, markets, and user profiles in settings needed to be prioritized.

Visual & Interaction Design

We worked with Audi’s existing pattern libraries, Audi CI, besides this being mandatory. It was important to ensure that a clean and consistent design was carried out across both the consumer and operational platforms.

Decisions We Made

Listed below are important design decisions and explanations we made during this project, hopefully this helps in bringing you into the experience of the project.

Members/Customers - Admins needed to be able to manage members, view customer and tier information, activate or deactivate, and carry out swap requests.
Inventory - Admins needed the ability to view vehicles in their inventory.
Markets (Future) - Audi talked about eventually wanting to manage multiple markets, and view various KPIs such as market performance.
Settings - Audi talked about eventually having different user permission levels (Admin, Concierge) once Audi select began to scale so it was important that we set that foundation in the initial MVP designs.

What We Shipped

After wrapping up the customers, inventory, locations, and the settings pages and talking with Audi stakeholders. Both parties felt it was okay to roll out the first iteration of the operational platform. We ended up tabling the scheduler page for the next iteration.

Audi Select - Operations Platform Prototype

Measuring Success

The operational platform was successfully shipped in conjunction with consumer platform in September 2018. Operation team members have been pleased with the platform and even given us some feedback. The standout feature right now is the ability to see swap requests within the platform.

Learnings & Looking Back

We want to continue exploring ways to make the vehicle swap request and process in general more seamless. Based off of some early feedback from team members, the scheduling feature will be included in the next iteration as the ability to schedule a vehicle to a customer in real-time is still a manual process.

View Project

Although the Audi select Operational Platform is not for public viewing, I’ll leave a link below to the Audi select consumer website. Thanks for taking the time to view this case study, To view the live project, please click the link below.