I led a cross-functional team to overhaul key points in the customer journey to better educate users on Shift’s process, financing and insurance products (add-ons).
Cox Automotive Research + our own discovery studies showed that only 1 out of 4 customers knew about vehicle protection plans, and those who did often had negative preconceived notions. Given that F&I sales made up more than half of Shift’s revenue and delivered the widest margin, seed-planting and dynamic education were critical to reach our OKRs.
PROBLEM
Sales advisors were burning bandwidth trying to educate a small handful of customers on Shift’s process, financing, and protection plans while trying to nurture the sale – all within a tiny window of time. That’s because further upstream, the online shopping experience gave hardly any information of value. This left customers confused and sales advisors stretched too thin.
OBJECTIVES
• Improve operational efficiency by priming and educating customers from the top of funnel
• Relaunch major sections of Shift.com to showcase Shift’s process, financing, and protection plans
• Implement an “awareness > consideration > urgency” strategy for how to talk about protection plans
• Expand gross profit per unit via new operational efficiencies and improved F&I sales (OKR #1)
• Align to UX best practices, industry trends and consumer expectations
IMPACT
• Significantly improved efficiency of sales operations
• Supported the 300% faster lead-to-purchase time
• Contributed to a 250% increase in add-on sales
• Drove 22% increase of organic shopping traffic (secondary impact)
Storytelling Strategy
For context, this initiative spun off from a separate effort to build a full-funnel storytelling strategy for how we talk about Shift’s protection plans at every stage of the journey.
I was running a workshop with sales and marketing when the deeper problem emerged. The salesfolk kept hearing the same complaint: “I couldn’t find any information on your website!” With that, my strategy had the backbone it needed and a place to put it in motion.
Higher Funnel
• New shopper kicking the tires
• “Is Shift the right place for me?”
• Plant the seed, familiarize, charm
• Tone = simple, general and broad
Mid Funnel
• Shopper now an active customer
• “I’m already spending a lot, why spend more?”
• Overcome objections, deliver facts, build trust
• Tone = friendly, informative, relatable, tangible
Lower Funnel
• Customer both excited and fatigued
• “Almost done! Can’t wait for my car.”
• Use momentum, drive value, spark FOMO
• Tone = direct, urgent, action-driven
Assessing The Current State
Looking at the tippy-top of the shopping flow, it was clear why customers were confused.
The three pages below were the most frequently visited at the start of the journey. Everything was out of date, incomplete, and lacked a story structure. In some places, the information was inaccurate, and nearly half the buttons were broken. Tap or click below to see for yourself.
Laying The Groundwork
All the static, surface-level parts of the website were hosted on Webflow, meaning that we could launch and iterate new pages with minimal dev requirement.
I immediately scheduled a walkthrough with our Webflow masters to learn the ropes.
Assembling The Team
By now, I had a vision that mapped to company OKRs, an executable plan, and the enthusiastic backing of my stakeholders. All I needed was a team.
One of my design colleagues already knew Webflow, so he happily jumped onboard. When I shared my vision with a nearby product manager, she practically set up the entire Jira epic before I could finish my spiel.
Story Wires and Prototypes
Good design always begins with good content, so we started by wireframing the stories.
My partner on the sales team was essential at this stage. I invited him to join our design sessions because he knew the products better than anyone else. This helped build a solid bridge between teams and turned him into a proud advocate of UX and Content Design.
The story wire gave way to a detailed prototype. I also wrote much of the content in sets in order to permutate it for different parts of the funnel.
The Game Changer
While layering on the details, we discovered the almighty Figma2Webflow plugin.
Minimal dev requirement good, zero dev requirement better!
This nifty tool accomplished all that and a bag of chips. By linking the figma file directly to our Webflow account, we could build, publish, and iterate webpages entirely on our own.
The Final Products
After hammering out the process for one page, we rinsed and repeated for the other two. The results were stellar.
Outcome
All three pages gained a 200% increase in traffic and became a powerful educational tool for sales teams. This, combined with their own operational improvement efforts, led to 300% faster lead-to-purchase times and 250% more add-on sales.
Active customers now conducted more research earlier in the funnel, which improved their interest and readiness to discuss Shift’s process, financing, and protection plans. Sales advisors could now jump right into details instead of doing all the heavy lifting to educate, influence, and answer general questions.
Our plugin also enabled Marketing to rapidly spin up new promotional landing pages, which boosted their operational efficiency and drove 22% more organic search traffic.