The Brief

SETF offers financial services to nearly 700,000 retail and lease customers across Southeast Toyota's 177 dealers in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

Its website, SETF.com, is intended to enable the organization to market vehicles, promote offers, and service its customers and is the gateway for registered customers to manage their accounts and vehicles, make payments, explore offers and coupons, and get help.

But the team that recently inherited the website saw an opportunity to improve the digital experience to boost the brand and rev up customer engagement.

Challenge

The website significantly limited SETF's ability to control the presentation of content and while SETF ranks highly for consumer financing satisfaction, its website didn't positively extend or enhance the brand, was payment-focused, and offered little value-added content - providing no reason to stay - let alone stay in the driver's seat of a Toyota at the end-of-lease or once their last payment was made.

SETF asked Wayfinder to address these challenges through calculated content and design improvements to maximize the impact on the customer experience while minimizing the impact on their existing processes and technologies. Add responsive design, a digital design system, and transition to development to the mix within a 10-week timeline and we had ourselves a challenge.

What We Learned

• The website didn't clearly communicate the organization's offerings.
• The navigation didn't consider the different needs of potential and existing customers, resulting in an architecture that didn't effectively satisfy either audience.
• Like the navigation, content, and promotions were generic and didn't consider the unique needs of their customers or their place in the customer journey.
• Page layouts were inflexible and inefficiently organized, limiting the organization's ability to make use of precious real estate.
• In-page messaging and notifications were impersonal and devoid of personality, challenging the organization's ability to connect with its audience.
• The search generated unexpected results and lacked features to easily refine and sort results making it difficult to find information.
• The few personalization features that were on the website were underused or didn't function.

How We Did It

A hefty scope, an aggressive timeline, and our unwavering commitment to quality might sound like a recipe for disaster, so how did we do it? Good question.

1. Experience, Expertise, and Authority.
   The project team was stacked with individuals with the experience, subject matter expertise, and the authority needed to drive clear decisions. This helped us to gather the intelligence we needed to inform our solutions, demystify industry-specific concepts, and collect thoughtful feedback more efficiently.
2. A Great Partner.
   We're fond of saying, "When you work with us, you become a part of our team and we become a part of yours," and we mean it. From day one, we relied on email, text, Slack, online meetings, and face-to-face working sessions to stay connected and collaborate throughout the design process. Additionally, transparency, mutual respect, and trust between our teams made it easy to partner with the SETF team and let us speed delivery.
3. We're Fast.
   We take pride in being able to quickly translate complex requirements into detailed and thoughtful deliverables. For the SETF.com redesign we were able to deliver high-fidelity wireframes, mockups, and prototypes within a day or two and sometimes hours of gathering knowledge or feedback.
4. Create. Test. Iterate. Repeat.
   We regularly shared our ideas communicated through sitemaps, process flows, wireframes, mockups, and prototypes to gather feedback and iterate as needed.

Strategy

The way we shop for and purchase or lease cars and trucks is quickly changing. But think about the last time you financed or leased a vehicle. How long did you spend shopping? A few weeks or days? How much time did you spend with the dealership? A few days or hours? Now compare this to the length of your relationship with your financing or lease provider.

Considering that customers could spend up to 60 months (five years) making payments on a vehicle, the opportunity for SETF to connect with and better serve its customers by elevating the customer experience was significant.

Collaborating with the SETF team, we identified four key areas for improvement to address their challenges and maximize improvements to the customer experience while minimizing impact to their underlying technologies and infrastructure.

Validation

No matter how much we think we know, we're well aware that we don't know it all. That's why we're big believers in the value of testing to validate our ideas. For SETF, we planned and conducted validation with SETF customers and customers of other brands to gather feedback quickly without breaking the bank.

After just five interviews we identified a half dozen opportunities for improvement that our experts overlooked. After eight interviews, we captured more of the same and a handful of new issues which we documented, analyzed, prioritized and used to refine the wireframes before moving into visual design.

Design for All Devices

Responsive or adaptive design are no longer the exception, but the rule. Considering our understanding of the online audience, their goals for accessing the website, the types of interactions, and our increasing reliance on mobile devices, we designed the experience to look and work equally well across devices while minimizing the differences in components and layouts to simplify the build.

The Handoff to Development

While we offer a comprehensive suite of digital services - including research, strategy, design, and development - we sometimes partner with specialized teams to support development. In this case, SETF asked us to collaborate with their development partner which required us to create more detailed specifications to communicate the styles and behaviors of each component and the guidelines for composing those elements into layouts.

Results

The relative success of customer-centric strategies and solutions hinge on an organization's willingness and ability to change its mindset and business processes to better serve its customers and spur real growth.

The SETF team entered the process with a strong desire to improve the customer experience, a willingness to evangelize solutions with colleagues and management, and the ability to make clear decisions, which significantly eased the experience design process.

The content on this website is copyright of Toyota, Southeast Toyota Finance, and/or Wayfinder.

Please contact us to learn more about this project and discuss how we can help you.

Wayfinder is a digital experience design agency specializing in solutions that extend and enhance our clients' brands and enable their success. We plan and conduct research and design and develop websites and applications that educate, enable, entertain, and entice your audiences.