Nissan believes that customer experience will be the key differentiating factor for automotive companies in today’s competitive marketplace. The global pandemic also presented new challenges, creating global supply shortages and drastically changing how customers could shop for vehicles, increasing the brand’s need for an exceptional experience. Thus, Nissan has been on a journey to transform the experience they deliver across their interactions with customers.

Nissan wanted to build tangible value with its online presence, creating a scalable global e-commerce solution while removing barriers between online and physical experiences. It was essential to foster engagement through the entire buying journey - from initial vehicle research until the customer took their first drive in their new car.

It was an enormous task to transition their global web presence from a purely informational tool to an e-commerce platform. Delivering the pre-order experience for Nissan’s new vehicle was the first step on this journey.

In an industry known for a buyer journey that takes place face-to-face, we focused on phygital retail experiences, a seamless blend of both physical and digital experiences. Customers would be able to utilize online and offline tools and resources in their purchasing decisions.

We focused on envisioning the future customer experience with the latest technology, applying local market innovation to go global, developing an integrated design and product solutions, and generating new value streams beyond the physical car. We didn’t just focus on the purchase itself but also identified that the time customers spent waiting for their vehicle gave us a significant opportunity to increase future levels of feature and accessory purchases.

Nissan created a parallel journey across its digital channels that enabled users to feel confident about choosing a car and paying a deposit online, even though they couldn’t get into dealerships in the same way as before.

We aimed to make an impact by fostering an interactive, immersive, fully customizable digital experience built for sales.

We integrated data from all touchpoints with customers, industry reports, and original research to create a complete view of the ideal customer journey. We conducted 10+ workshops and analyzed and consolidated 100+ research sources to define customer truths for every customer journey stage. Finally, we analyzed 50+ customer moments against the commercial, brand, and customer impact measures to determine 10 moments that matter the most. We synthesized this data to create a new framework, Moments that Matter Most, for identifying and quantifying the fundamental interactions that drive a positive customer experience.

We were able to pinpoint the essential user needs that are most relevant when considering a purchase, from initial research to the first interaction with the dealership and, ultimately, the decision to purchase.

Nissan conducted an extensive discovery phase, including in-depth interviews with users in key markets worldwide, to establish a concrete set of requirements to design its pre-order solution around. Agile development teams then worked in sprints to deliver the pre-order journey over 8 months between November 2020 and June 2021.

Development of the live product was carried out following Agile principles with a dedicated development team working in two week sprints to deliver iterative improvements in the pre-order journey based on feedback from analytics and a constant review of analytics data.

The first MVP of the new Pre-order solution launched in Japan in June 2021 and has since rolled out to 7 other countries, including the UK and the United States.

Nissan is now working on the next phase of its rollout plan and has aspirations to expand pre-orders to other models.

Our work was transformative for the Nissan website, representing the first step toward becoming an e-commerce company. The results were highly successful, exceeding the KPI set for the project of 2,000. In Japan, one key market, there were 100 pre-orders in the first 30 minutes after launch, 1,000 pre-orders in 4 hours, and the 5,000 target was broken on the first weekend.

Year to date, the pre-order page has received more than 550,000 visits and over 13,000 deposits were taken. This represents more than $6.8m USD in revenue.

Creating an optimized customer-centric experience in 9 primary markets is only half the breakthrough. The other half adopted a new organizational mindset that allowed high-performance teams to thrive with a new agile research methodology and resulted in a more effective design process, faster delivery, more intelligent decision-making, and ideating options with a lower cost.