Keytree helps Jaguar Land Rover develop their Retailer Systems strategy

The Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) Customer First initiative is a global business strategy developed to ensure the continued success and recognition of the JLR brand. JLR analysed feedback from 250,000 customers in order to identify the five most important expectations that customers have. These were used to develop the Customer First Principles: transparent, personalised, make me feel special, easy to do business with and dependable.

In late 2016, JLR introduced the Customer First Principles – a platform for the continuous improvement in all aspects of behaviours of its workforce for today and tomorrow. JLR wants to put customers at the heart of everything they do.

Keytree User Research

The JLR Retailer network stretches far and wide, encompassing every corner of the globe. Every day, Retailer employees deal face-to-face with JLR customers to complete vehicle sales and provide essential maintenance and repair services. Therefore, any successful customer-facing initiative would need to include this critical customer touch point.

To support its network, JLR has in place a range of applications, which are used on a daily basis by the Retailer network. These applications support every aspect of the Retailer business and are instrumental in delivering a high level customer experience.

To understand how these applications were performing and the level of impact they were having on the customer experience, JLR asked long-term partner and User Research specialists Keytree to conduct in-depth research into the use of these applications by those employees with a pivotal customer-facing role.

JLR wanted to understand first-hand how JLR applications were impacting the sales and service experience. The outcome of this research would become vital to JLR, in helping it develop a roadmap to address Retailer pain points that were impacting the customer experience.

logo JLR Jaguar Land Rover

Researching application requirements for JLR Retailers

Keytree proposed an international study looking at three markets: the US, the UK, which is the home market and the European market, represented by Germany. The initial internal workshops invited a wide variety of JLR stakeholders who have responsibility for delivering systems to Retailers. The aim of the workshops was to agree on the research goals, priorities and who should be included within the study. The Keytree User Research team then created a research design that covered the range of Retailer businesses: single branded, dual-branded and multi-branded plus the range of Retailer sizes: large, medium and small – including independent retailers and retailers within large groups. The research design was critical in gaining JLR stakeholder buy-in that the research would cover all of the different types of retailers within the JLR Retailer network.

The value of the research approach designed by Keytree was to create a modular format that included a range of different research methods targeted towards different roles and retailer businesses. This approach was carefully constructed so that enough data could be collected across the large number of different customer-facing tasks and applications so that stakeholders could be confident in the research findings and eventual recommendations.

An initial questionnaire was developed and analysed before speaking with Retailers to hone the research design and identify areas where further investigation would be needed. Each individual employee session was personalised to pick up on specific areas raised from their survey response. By the end of the research, Keytree had spoken to 120 individuals across three countries and collected over 4,300 findings. These findings were used to develop the set of priorities for Retailer Systems to improve the end Customer Experience and the Retailer Experience Systems Principles, which were later adopted by JLR to be used in the development of any JLR application to be used within the Retailers network.

Recognising the importance of the global retailer network

JLR fully recognises that its Retailer network underpins the JLR Customer Experience and that they are an essential component for the success of the JLR Customer First Principles. To support all sales and after-sales activities, JLR Retailers have access to almost 30 bespoke applications which are used to support different stages of the customer experience. Each application is a bespoke application and as a result, each application has a different log-in and a different look and feel.

The research highlighted one overarching requirement which was to focus on making each application available from a central retailer hub with one log on. This central hub would provide Retailers with a way to personalise their experience so that they need only see the information that is relevant to them and the applications they use as part of their role. Ultimately, Retailers want an experience where all JLR applications are integrated and work together seamlessly.

As a direct result, JLR, supported by Keytree developed a plan to enhance the Global Retailer Portal (GRP) to address some of the key requirements from the research. GRP is a multilingual system that supports retailers in 18 languages across 123 countries and is available 24/7, a vital part of the system landscape.

The new version of the portal will provide a Single Sign-On service and will enable Retailers to personalise their portal so that they can control the applications and information that they see. The portal will be enhanced to be the one-stop shop for Retailers to access everything that they need to provide a great customer experience.

The research conducted by Keytree has been widely shared within JLR from top executives to the individual product owners responsible for the applications used by Retailers. As a result, a number of key decisions have been made to improve the Retailer Systems provided by JLR to their Retailer network. The findings formed a core part of the requirements for the new Global Retailer Portal, which is currently being developed and added requirements to the global CRM solution for Retailers that is currently being rolled out.

The Retailer Experience Systems Principles, developed from the findings have been agreed and are now applied to all future developments aimed at Retailers. As a result of rigorous research design, execution, analysis and final communications approach, Keytree has provided JLR with the insight they require to deliver on their Customer First Principles within their Retailer network.