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Car purchasing reimagined – Search, finance, drive away

Car purchasing reimagined – Search, finance, drive away

The way we buy cars has changed dramatically

Consumers want to use digital channels for comparing, choosing and buying vehicles, just like they do with other sorts of products. This global car giant asked GFT to help them reimagine automobile sales. Discover how a digital storefront lets customers find and finance the vehicles of their dreams in a showroom that never closes.

Close-up of a car wheel on an open road, symbolising the seamless process of searching, financing, and driving away with a new vehicle. — Discover how GFT is reimagining the car purchasing experience. This image of a car on an open road represents the streamlined journey from searching for a vehicle to financing and driving away, showcasing innovative solutions in the automotive industry.

One-stop shop

A one-stop shop for vehicle sourcing and finance

Customer journey

Engaging customer journeys across brands in global locations

Cloud-based solution

A strategic cloud-based solution

Partner

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform.

Challenge

From awareness to action

This financial subsidiary of one of the world’s largest car manufacturers wanted to reduce the friction within the sales process. It believed that simple customer journeys could increase satisfaction, improve sales and reduce dropout rates across all of its brands and markets.

The aim of the project was to empower customers to find, finance or lease a vehicle online or refer qualified leads to a dealer. Customers should also be able to browse and buy a range of insurance and other mobility services as part of the journey. All data would be captured to ensure continual improvement.

Getting help for the journey

The client knew GFT from previous projects. GFT had shown a rich mixture of business and technical skills and had an international presence as well as the right service culture to deliver a successful project.

Following a competitive tender in early 2019, GFT was selected to support the design and development of engaging customer journeys for a digital storefront as a front-end to multiple back-end solutions for individual brands and markets.

Engagement

Reducing the distance between customer and car

Beginning with a single GFT team and three simple customer journeys, the collaboration flourished, and the project scope expanded. In just over a year, three teams, totaling over 50 people, have implemented more than 40 unique customer journeys in 14 countries to boost customer engagement and improve choice.

With its strong global presence, GFT was able to develop flexible customer journeys that reflect the culture and requirements of individual markets. The common aim of each journey is to enable customers to close contracts digitally for vehicles and related services, such as servicing, extended warranty and insurance.

Being part of a global digital program, one of the major challenges was to interact with multiple stakeholders for product and market requirements, API and cloud infrastructure, and digital marketing, including analytics, CRM and campaigning. The international team setup was a truly global experience for all parties involved.
Drawing on its wealth of technical and financial expertise, GFT also implemented a range of additional projects, including shared services for document generation and media storage or the integration of specific services, such as digital account check or legitimation.

Most recently, GFT implemented a payment solution that can be easily integrated into customer journeys, brand portals, or webshops to offer payment options like MasterCard, Visa, SEPA or PayU.

JavaScript, TypeScript, REACT
Node.js, serverless framework, AWS DynamoDB, Java
Concourse CI/CD, TestCafe

Benefit

Blending automation with consultancy

The customer journey program has been so successful, it has been rolled out globally. Working as a trusted adviser, GFT helps prioritize and streamline projects to align delivery with the strategic plan.

Projects with a high business value – such as the launch of a new electric vehicle, bundled with a package of financial & mobility services – are implemented by a bespoke team guided by specific goals and milestones, while standard customer journeys are delivered using a partially automated “factory approach” drawing on reusable components. This tiered process shortens time to market, boosts efficiency and mitigates delivery risk. GFT also takes care of application management and operations.

The success of the program is about much more than the smart use of technology. It’s about two companies sharing the same vision, values and objectives. GFT has lived up to its promise of being small enough to care but big enough to deliver and there are more projects on the horizon.

“It has been an amazing experience to be part of a global program for bringing digital products to the world. Sharing the same vision with the client, our international teams supported the rollout for multiple markets.”

Alpesh Tailor

Group Head of Banking Solutions and Cloud

GFT