Saam Ejlali - Toyota Financial Services

Toyota Financial Services

UX Research | Journey Mapping | Presentation

✦ Overview

Client: Toyota Financial Services

Team: Saam Ejlali (UX Researcher), Daniel Katrencik (Creative Director), Bharat Sharma (UX Designer)

Project: Examining Retailer and Buyer Interactions

Duration: 3 Months

My role:

Identified stakeholders and conducted in-depth interviews with various teams across the Toyota organization to gather information and insights.

Developed and implemented research plans, including the creation of interview scripts and protocols.

Analyzed and synthesized data to identify key findings and insights.

Translated research findings into actionable recommendations and clear research objectives.

Developed and delivered comprehensive customer and dealer user journey maps, highlighting current state challenges and opportunities.

Created and presented comprehensive research reports and presentations to communicate findings and recommendations to key stakeholders.

✦ Business Goal

Toyota Financial Services (TFS) plans to streamline the customer and dealer experience from beginning to end. This includes all aspects of the process, such as researching, buying, onboarding, servicing, returning, and repurchasing. Currently, each dealership has been responsible for designing its own user experience, leading to inconsistencies and difficulties moving from one stage to the next. TFS aims to address this issue by gaining a clear understanding of the current behaviors and needs of both customers and dealers before proposing any solutions.

✦ Objective

Identify and map out pain points in the current customer and dealer user journey across all Toyota and TFS platforms and identify potential solutions.

✦ Current State Analysis

We analyzed the features of customer-facing applications in the Toyota and TFS digital landscape.

The following applications were analyzed:

Toyota.com
Smart Path (Toyota's new online portal facilitating digital car purchases)
Buy a Toyota
Dealer Sites
TFS Website
Toyota Mobile App
TFS Mobile App
Inspection Mobile App
Signal (Software to help dealers identify promising leads for outreach purposes)
Kinto Link (Car rental & ride-sharing app)

Current State Analysis (CUSTOMER).pdf

✦ Competitive Research

An analysis of key players within the automotive sales sector was conducted, focusing on comparing and contrasting the digital offerings provided by each company.

The following competitors were analyzed:

Roadster
Nissan
Honda
Tesla
Ford
Volvo
Carvana

Competitive Analysis (CUSTOMER).pdf

✦ Personas

We created the following personas by analyzing the information provided by dealerships and the customers they wanted to cater to.

User Personas.pdf

✦ Toyota Ecosystem / Mind Map

From initial stakeholder meetings, I saw the need to understand Toyota's many front-end and back-end applications. This complexity made tracking them hard. We used to log qualitative data in Excel, but it was tough to grasp system connections through text alone, causing confusion and context loss during tab navigation. So, I transferred the data to Miro, where its visual format made it easier to analyze and understand the relationships between applications.

For better visibility, you can zoom in/out or click to view in a new tab.

✦ Customer / Dealer User Journey

After completing the Mind-Map/Toyota ecosystem, I started working on the user journey. It was evident that Toyota prioritized the needs of their dealers, leading to a disjointed journey for customers, with five different entry points that diverged into two paths.

Entry points:

Toyota.com (TMNA)
SmartPath
BuyAToyota.com
Dealer Sites
In-Person

Divergence points:

SmartPath
In-Person

This created misalignments across different sites and applications, making the user journey fragmented. This issue exists in the Front-End, and the Back-End presents a separate set of problems. The images below illustrate my process of creating the current state customer/dealer journey map.