Grow New Car Bookings at Acko Drive
Reduce cost of leads and improve conversion by generating high intent organic leads.
TL;DR:
The collaboration with Acko Drive team provided a hands-on experience with a startup-within-a-startup striving for product-market fit. Acko Drive: A virtual car dealership platform aiming to streamline the car buying process.
Key challenge: Increase online bookings and improve lead quality.
Approach:
We conducted thorough research (customer support calls, online reviews, user interviews). This gave us clear understanding of the jobs to be done and pain points in the new car buying process.
We established clear OKRs with the business teams that were focused on increasing organic leads and traffic.
We further implemented data-driven decision making using tools like Segment and Amplitude. This provided us opportunities to identify new patterns in the behaviour and build and measure impactful features.
We also helped in establishing two core value proposition for Acko Drive- Express Delivery, Hot Deals. This became the strategic focus for the business teams to sell this as Acko Drive's USP.
Focussing on SEO optimisation helped us improve organic traffic and generate high quality leads.
Adopted an experimentation mindset for high-risk, high-impact ideas.
The results after 12 months were as mentioned below:
2.5x increase in car bookings (north star metric)
56% increase in organic lead generation (L0 metric)
181% increase in month-on-month organic traffic (L1 metric)
About Acko Drive:
Acko Drive, a strategic initiative by Acko Technologies (parent of Acko General Insurance), is a virtual car dealership platform that is trying to create an ecosystem of buyers, sellers and intermediaries. Their long term vision is to provide a seamless experience to the new car buyers throughout the car ownership lifecycle like buying a new car, maintenance, insurance claims and services and selling the old car.
Let us look at the value proposition of the players involved in this ecosystem:
Value proposition for the new car buyers:
Offers customers lower prices and quick and on-time deliveries ensuring the customers get the best deal.
It also removes the friction for the customers by helping them identify the suitable dealership in their city that offers the desired car model, colour and delivery dates at the convenience of their homes.
Acko Drive also offered flexibility to the customers to cancel the car bookings, change colour or model even before the car is delivered.
For the car dealerships:
Provides dealers with free leads. Acko Drive doesn't charge any fees for the lead generation from the dealers. This would help the car dealers to achieve their targets set by the manufacturer.
Further Acko Drive also helps in cross-selling of value added services via the website.
For Acko General Insurance:
Bundle Acko's digital-first, direct to consumer auto insurance with new car purchases.
This model creates a win-win situation for Acko, new car buyers, and offline dealers.
Problem Statement:
Acko approached Thoughtworks around March 2021. After the briefing call with Acko Drive team we could gather a couple of insights around the major challenges that Acko Drive team was facing:
The first objective of Acko Drive was to increase the number of bookings made online. Since Acko Drive bundles their own auto insurance products with the new cars booked via the website. This will help them to increase the average ticket size of auto insurance by 3x.
Acko Drive depended on third party partners for purchasing leads for new cars. Acko Drive had an in-house sales team of ~30 members who would call the leads received from the partners and try to convert leads into bookings. The problem with the third party leads was poor conversion due the to quality of leads which was pushing the total cost of lead generation up.
At that stage, Acko Drive was more like an experimental product and the Acko Drive team had targets of showing significant impact so that the idea of buying cars online would get validated. The success of Acko Drive would ensure additional funding for Acko Drive team to further build the full fledged product that they had envisioned.
My Role:
We formed a team from Thoughtworks to engage with Acko Drive. The team consisted of multiple roles- product manager, UX designer, Frontend developers, Backend developer and quality assurance engineers. This team would be working with the Acko Drive business and marketing team to deliver. My role was to lead the technology team from a product standpoint and work along with the business and marketing team at Acko Drive to build solution around the above identified problem statement and agreed metrics.
Understanding the business and industry landscape
Lean Inception:
Acko Drive Website 1.0:
We started our analysis by visiting the Acko Drive website and experiencing the customer journey first hand. The journey then was very simple and we had identified a few gaps:
The website consisted of a long catalogue of cars that was supported by very basic set of filters like body type, brand, model and others which a visitor can use to narrow down the results of the car.
As a visitor on the website, on the first visit I would be prompted on the first visit to select a preferred city, browse catalogue, select a car and click on generate quote if I wanted to get a detailed price breakup for the chosen car.
To generate the quote, the visitor would have to validate their phone number via an OTP. At this stage a lead would be created with very basic set of information about the visitor captured in the respective CRM.
On lead generation, the visitor would receive calls from the dedicated sales team of ~30 members who will try to convert the lead into a customer.
The website also had a basic blog section with some articles which was maintained by the in-house content and SEO teams. However the navigation from the blog to catalogue was broken then.
The website was integrated with the free version of Google Analytics and a few custom events were being tracked.
Research:
After the analysis of the customer journey through the website, we decided to dive deep into business landscape, industry landscape, target customers and build more understanding about their personas and pain points.
Business Landscape:
To understand the business landscape better, we started with an activity to get the relevant business stakeholders and key decision makers in the room to fill in a business model canvas.
The below mentioned screenshot is an example and not the actual version which was more detailed.
Research:
The second part was to understand the customer personas, pain points and their new car purchase journey. The client teams were apprehensive in giving us the contact details of the successful and unsuccessful leads for the user interviews. Therefore, we identified 3 other alternates to get a detailed view on the customer pain points, journey and ideal customer persona:
The customer support call recordings: This helped us understand what questions do customers ask, how they are guided by the customer support teams and what are the pain points when they use Acko Drive services or why they prefer Acko Drive over the offline dealers.
The second avenue was to look at the customer reviews on the internet forums like Team BHP, Acko Drive social pages, Google reviews and so on. This helped us gather the common themes around the review.
The third avenue was talking to potential new car buyers in our friends, family and professional circle. We conducted detailed user interviews to understand their car buying process.
Lastly we also leveraged our internal market research team to conduct secondary research around the passenger car automobile segment in India. This secondary research helped us understand the dynamics with the entire ecosystem.
We created a few artefacts from the above exercise that are listed here:
Product Discovery and Development:
We now had a list of insights from the research phase with a number of customer pain points identified. We also derived multiple user personas and had to evaluate which ones do we prioritise. The two major insights that stood out during the research were:
Most of the customers are always looking out for two things while buying a car:
The best offer: the customers visit multiple dealerships around their vicinity to get quotes around their preferred cars. The process was tiresome and there was an unmet need for getting the best The best offer can include two major aspects:
Discounts.
Buyback value on their old cars.
On-time delivery: The context here was that there was a semiconductor shortage around 2022 and therefore many customers were facing a delay in the delivery of the cars.
As the next step, we established various stages of the funnel:
Acquisition: Traffic on Home Page
Discovery: View catalogue
Engagement: Signup with mobile number and OTP
Express interest: Generating quote for the desired car variant and model.
Booking: Book a new car by paying the token amount.
Delivery: Delivery of the car at customer's home
Cancelation: Customer had flexibility to cancel the car post booking.
Third step was to establish OKRs in alignment with the Acko Drive stakeholders:
North Star Metric: Increase online bookings via the website.
L0 Metrics: Increase the number of organic leads generated. A special focus will be on the lead quality as we need to improve conversion of the leads.
L1 Metrics: Increase organic traffic on the Acko Drive website. This will result in increase in the leads.
The next step was prioritisation:
While starting the engagement, we had received a wish list of features from the Acko Drive team. However insights from research, alignment on the OKRs helped us to manage stakeholder expectations on delivering the items on wish list vs applying data-led product thinking.
We adopted a quarterly roadmap practice where we will optimise the experience on those parts of the journeys that will help directly impact our north star metrics.
Therefore we deprioritised Cancelation flows for the time being to focus on the customer journey till booking.
Brainstorming: We also adapted a leaf from the book Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Tores to bring internal and external stakeholders on multiple discussions to brainstorm various solutions with respect to the problem statement gathered during the research phase.
The solutions from this brainstorming sessions were then prioritised based on evidence, impact and efforts.
Evidence was supported with the insights from the research phase.
Impact was a guesstimate based data from Google Analytics or insights from user research.
Efforts was an outcome of estimation exercise with the technology teams.
Build vs Experiment: High/Medium risk, high impact ideas landed up in the experiments backlog. Other ideas landed in the build backlog.
Every sprint we had a dedicated budget for build vs experiment ideas.
Experimentation:
The Experimentation backlog consisted of high/medium risk and high impact ideas. The risk was measure with respect to the L0 metrics. The below mentioned screenshot contains one of the approaches to the experiment that we had conducted.
We had used a tool called as feature hub since it offers some flexibility and also comes with a free plan. We would design experiments by
Defining the hypothesis.
Divide the traffic into control and target groups (done by the feature hub randomly)
Define the time period for the experiment to run.
Define the metrics that we would track to measure its effectiveness between the control and the target group.
Conclude the experiment as success or failure.
The login to save button in the below mentioned screenshot was introduced after experimentation:
Data-driven Decision Making:
As mentioned above, when we started the engagement with Acko Drive, they were using the free version of Google Analytics to track important events. After multiple rounds of conversation, we helped them realise that the data tracking was important to understand the customer behaviour and Google Analytics' free plan was not scalable in the longer run due to restrictions on the number of custom events. This is where they adopted Segment for data collection and Amplitude for data analysis.
We helped the Acko Drive team to form a data tracking strategy from scratch. This included:
Identifying the important events that would enable us to measure the performance of the newly launched features.
Define the customer and event attributes that we would like to track.
Prepare a data dictionary of the events.
Prepare dashboards that was accessible to the core business teams and leadership at Acko Drive.
We also had a weekly call to reflect on the learnings from the last feature release that would help us collect feedback and align the stakeholders to our next steps.
The below mentioned features were outcomes of data-driven decision making:
We identified the CTR for cars with early delivery dates vs cars with later delivery dates. The CTR of cars with early delivery dates was higher. This is how the idea of Express Delivery vs Standard Delivery evolved. Today this reflects in multiple places on the website like express delivery as hot filters, express delivery as tags on the catalogue. Express delivery also formed the basis of paid marketing campaigns during festivals to drive more traffic on the website.
There were several other examples like Hot Deals which would tag the selected cars where customers would get better offers as compared to the offline dealers. This was based on the intelligence gathered by the in-house catalogue team and dealer relationship managers.
'Express Delivery' and 'Hot Deals' slowly became the core value proposition for Acko Drive to differentiate themselves from the competition.
Another noteworthy feature was choose your variant:
A car has multiple levels of hierarchy: brand--> model--> variant--> colours.
The variant can have multiple attributes like fuel type, transmission.
The price of the car would vary based on the variant and the colour.
The variant names were also not self-explanatory and in the older design the visitors would have to go through multiple iterations to choose the variant with their desired combination.
This was also evident through the data that we were tracking on the product details page.
Thus 'Choose Your Variant' was born. This feature provided an experience similar to the filters that would help the visitors narrow down their preferred car variant with required specifications.
SEO and Content:
At this stage, Acko Drive was heavily dependent on leads from 3rd parties. However these leads had poor conversions and was resulting in higher cost of lead generation. It was evident from the month on month data of lead conversions that organic channels had the higher conversions as they were high intent leads. To solve for high quality organic leads it was important that we improve organic traffic on the website.
To improve the organic traffic visits on the website, it was important that we improved our search engine ranks. This is where the collaboration with the SEO team started. We analysed product pages multiple top competitors and used tools like Semrush to identify factors that was driving traffic on the competitor website.
The findings from these analysis were as mentioned below:
Broken navigations between content pages and catalogue was hampering the discover of the cars and deals listed on the website.
There was a need to target customers who were in the research phase with high quality content that was not limited to only text based blogs.
Optimising the website URLs and results to support top queries made by the potential customers on the search engines example: keywords or phrases like 'new cars in Mumbai', 'best Maruti cars under 10 lakh' and so on.
Lack of content integration and FAQs on the product detail pages.
We focused on the organic leads and organic traffic goals to solve for acquisition.
Solving for Lead Quality:
We also had brainstormed on an idea to identify and prioritise high quality leads for the assisted journey where customer support team will nurture the lead and try to convert them into a customer. By looking at the data of signups and page visits- we could derive some correlation on the lead quality vs the source and the journey followed by the customer on the website. The idea was to experiment if our hypothesis was true that customer who visit a certain pages and come from a particular source (based on UTM params) have a higher intent to buy a car vs the others.
If the hypothesis were to be true, we were planning to enrich the lead information with this additional data and provide a lead quality score that would help the customer support team to understand the priority for calling and nurturing the lead.
We had a detailed PRD created for this.
The further journey:
The product discovery based approach that we adopted at Acko Drive helped us identify the right set of problems and build solutions that are unique to those problems. The data-driven decision making and continuous measurement of the impact helped us with course corrections
After 12 months, we had created significant impact on the north star metrics. This is where the management's perception towards Acko Drive changed. It was no longer an experimental product but started becoming a serious business. This is where the leadership at Acko Drive decided to build an in-house technical team to take this forward towards their long term vision (similar to Acko's General Insurance).
Impact created with Acko Drive:
2.5x increase in the number of car bookings made via Acko Drive in 12 months
56% increase in organic lead generation.
181% increase in the month on month organic traffic visits to the website.
Key Learnings from the Acko Drive Engagement:
Acko Drive was a great first hand experience on solving for product-market fit. This involved lot of research, experimentation, brainstorming and product thinking.
It gave me an opportunity to get involved in strategic decision making at Acko Drive where I helped in defining their long term vision, core value propositions, established build vs experiment backlogs.
It also gave me an opportunity to coach the stakeholders on importance of product thinking, data-driven decision making and experimentation.
I also got a closer to work on understanding the nuances of SEO and how they can be applied to the product to improve its discovery on search engines.