PegaWorld iNspire 2024: Wipro and Ford Revolutionize the Test Drive Experience for New Vehicle Launches Across Europe

Um, so I'll introduce myself briefly. Um, I'm Jeff, I'm a product owner from Ford of Europe. As I said, I've been 17 years at Ford across different things and spent the last two years working on the test drive project together with Wipro. Ford Motor company. Apparently we need a slide for Ford Motor Company. I didn't know we had stock slides for us. Because everyone does usually know who we are. But yeah, Ford Motor Company was split into three business units Ford Blue, Ford Pro, and Model 120 years of history. Family owned from the beginning and even today as well.

And in the bottom right, we've got, um, the Ford Explorer EV, which is the the main focus of all of the the work that we've been doing over the last two, two years to prepare for this launch. Um, so I'll allow Chandra just to come up and introduce himself as well. Let's get started. Thanks, Jeff. And I know Jeff is going to be back on stage very shortly. Uh, for a great story, one of the best stories on automotive. Transformation for digital experience that we will see. And I'm hopeful that you will all have a great experience in the next 30 40 minutes. So just to set the stage, my name is Chandra Herbert.

I had digital experience for Wipro and what does Wipro do? And it's easy for me to put that into three words. And that's there. It's one of the largest trusted. And why do I say trusted? It has won a lot of ethical awards, big on culture, values and what we follow as habits which inculcate this thought process day in, day out translates to how we deal with customers. Technology driven technology, end of the day has to solve two things for a business. It has to make it business life. Very very simplistic.

They need to provide a lot of simplicity and agility to business. And to me, when I think of simplicity and agility for business, what does it translates to the end consumer? It has to translate to a powerful customer experience. And when we think of customer experience today, customer experience is across multiple channels. We hear this omnichannel whether it's digital set of channels, physical channels, physical stores, kiosks, however they interact with an enterprise or even through the dealers distributors. They are also an important channel across these different channels which the customers interact. How do you provide frictionless, seamless, personalized, consistent experience? And that's what a technology company means to me in this construct. How do you drive agility and simplicity to your business?

How do you help their customers have a consistent, seamless experience across the board? The second biggest stakeholder outside of customers for any enterprise is employees. So when we think of experience, we also think of a continuum from an employee experience standpoint as well and employee experience with the enterprise and all of the tools and technologies that they need and the employees. Here I'm extending the terminology to include your dealers, distributors, what do they need to support the end customer experience? Because customer experience is a continuum, and that's the primary purpose of thinking through from a technology standpoint. The third aspect that you see here is about purpose. Now, one of the great things that powers every employee in Wipro is the fact that the chairman founder has pledged close to 67% of the company's assets irrevocably to a charitable trust. What that means is 67% of the profits generated by Wipro goes to charitable purposes. Now this is a purpose that drives the company.

Now, I spoke about experience on how it helps customers to view the enterprise. Interactions are much more effective way and why customer experience is important. I want to bring to today's afternoon's topic, which is Wipro Ford's story on transforming automotive experience. We value the relationship with Ford. It's 15 plus years across the board. We have done collectively with Ford a lot of work, and one such work is automotive transformation. And when we think of technology and transformation for customers outside of the programs that we deliver, it's about the thought leadership. It's about different areas that we co-create co experiment. And today's afternoon conversation is one such transformative experiences and experiments, which I would like to welcome Jeff back onto stage to talk further on.

Thank you Chandra. So yeah, as Chandra was saying, we was, um, focused today on the test drive experience, but a bit of a background about how we, um, identified test drivers as an area for us to, to have an improvement for. Um, so as I said, um, family owned and there's still a lot of family involvement with Ford today over Ford and as our chief customer experience officer. So there's quite up there, which I won't read to you. Um, but it mentions trust in there. And customer experience and trust are kind of intrinsically linked. So we need to make sure that we we are a trusted company and we can do that through our customer experiences. Um, in Ford of Europe, we've got, um, a particular opportunity which is focused on the EV market, the electric vehicles, and particularly for, for us, We've got a new vehicle that was being launched, um, early this year called the Ford Explorer, which is different to the Ford Explorer in North America. Um, but we predict we're going to need 50% of our sales to come from, to come from the, um, the other brands, our competitors.

So to do that, we had to have an improvement in our customer experience. We needed to be trusted by those new customers that we're going to attract. So Test Drive was one of the, um, one of the customer experiences that we targeted and the new test drive experience for customers, and also how we manage that for our dealers as well. So underpinning the key focus for us today is those drivers. Excuse me, 80% of buyers are new to EVs in Europe. So we need that trust. And 50% of EV buyers new to Ford. So we need that trust as well. And we've got two key areas that we're focused on our customers and our dealers, and we can go through a little bit more about the requirements that we we identified and targeted throughout this project as we move forwards and the key opportunities as well.

In the bottom right there is the covering, the scope, I suppose, of the of the, um, the project in total. So I think. Chandra, what are you going to cover this next bit here? Sure. Uh, this gives a good amount of view around what are the product features that we launched and that provides all of the different things of, uh, as I talked about, dealer here for Ford is a very important segment. And when we think about any of this test drive experience, how do you make sure that there is a consistency from end consumer standpoint and for them to book the test drive for them to locate geographically, which dealer is nearby, making sure the inventory of the vehicles is available, the different features that the dealer needs to provide that, and integrating this with the fort's data. There's a real time availability of what the you know, the sales assistant, for example, from a dealer standpoint. So if I'm a consumer booking a test drive, what's closest to me, what vehicle is available to me, will I get this particular slot? Is the is the dealer providing the support to me at that particular slot?

And if there's changes, the dealers can notify the Ford as well. So that part of the product features that you see supports wide dimension keeping employee or customer experience at the center of it. And employee here loosely translates to dealer in that sense. But when you think of any customer experience design, when we look at it, advisor driven and human centered, design driven, That's when we could think of the different elements that comes from a feature standpoint to support that. And there is a whole bunch of technology aspects that goes into it. We'll cover that in a little bit in a detail, but essentially thinking through from an experiential transformation instead of inconsistent across the different dealers. How can you make it a consistent, Ford controlled, Ford brand controlled experience, which gives a much more consistent for the end consumers is the direction in which we went through this whole process. Okay, now to how did we approach this and how did we go through the execution? Uh, Jeff, over to you.

Thank you. Chandra. Oh. Oops. Sorry. Okay. Um, so at the beginning of the project, um, we started planning this, and we we understood that we needed to really understand that improvement in the customer experience that we wanted to deliver, and needed to be underpinned by an equally easy to use, easy to experience dealer application as well. So we were moving from oh, is it not presentation. Thank you Sanjiv.

So we were moving from a test drive request solution in, in Europe, where, um, a customer would go onto the Ford website and they'll put in their details and say that they want to test drive a vehicle, and we send that information off to our dealers. Um, dealers hopefully can contact those customers and they'll hopefully get that dealer, that customer booked into an actual test drive. And but it doesn't always happen. Um, And that's the real opportunity for us, is to try and capture more customers at the point that they want to book a test drive. So the data requirements that we looked at, I spent a good amount of time going around a lot of our Ford dealers in person and to try and understand exactly how they're delivering test drives today, how they take those bookings, what systems they use, how they're managing things. So that was the user observation side in different markets, just to see how different people and different dealers interacted and used different systems, and how those customer experiences differed for, for them in the dealership as well. And we had a number of one on one interviews with dealer groups, management and market level. And we had a pilot group as well that helped us when we were going through a prototyping phase to review our designs and our intended processes, just to see if that was going to be something that had any issues or any problems that they could foresee. And we spent a lot of time looking at customer experience.

We came up with a design through research and looking at competitors and came up with this three step process. And one of the things that we wanted to make sure that we did deliver is, um, a different allow the customer to have a choice over they have how they deliver their test drive experience themselves. So whether they have an accompanied test drive or whether they test drive completely on their own. So we took all of that information and we underpinned a little bit around these principles of our marketing strategy. So we wanted to have a deeper view into our sales funnel, which we have on the back of implementing this process. And we've got central CRM, which gives a consistency of our brand messaging, and we've got efficiency in scale as well. One of the key things that we've been able to deliver as part of this is, is what we call a dealer first customer experience. So it allows the dealers to take our centrally developed, um, test drive booking experience and put that on their own local sites and presence online. So we have the maximum amount of customers going through.

And we've got Sanjiv now just to talk a bit about how that was done. So I'm Sanjiv Dubey, I lead the Pega practice and RPA practice for Wipro globally under Digital Experience Unit. I am incredibly proud of this application, which has been delivered by the team over such a short period of time. I fundamentally believe that any application which is of this size and the impact that it makes to the dealers and the end customers and employees needs an absolutely robust foundation which is built on the business and IT architecture, something that was alluded by Alan in The Morning Call as well. This particular architecture was evolved with a collaboration between the Ford Enterprise Architecture team. So big call out to Tom Juniper's team. I know some of the, uh, members from his team might be here AJ Lucas, Sairam. We collaborated with them to ensure that we can define this architecture, which defines the reusability, the different definition, or how it isolates between different units and modularity of the purpose. Right.

We have also been very fortunate, actually, to be driving a large program with the Ford's US unit. Some of the leaders are here, so we are incredibly thankful to them for supporting us over there. We took those learnings from the US side. It's called Guest Experience Program. We took those learnings from the US side of the House, brought it over to the Europe. We applied all the enterprise reusable assets. We refactored them where it was required. We added new assets that you see over here in terms of Medallia integration and some of the other integrations, which was fed back to the library of reusable assets which are available with for tomorrow. All these application assets are available to Ford for any future Pega program, which would be used using Pega technology at Ford.

The ones that you see in different colors, those are modules that are built as completely reusable modules that you can take as you require in your application, and the ones in blue are something that we brought over from the US side of the house, from the guest experience platform to Europe. The execution roadmap. So as you can see, it had a it started with a fundamental discovery, trying to understand how the test drive experience is happening today. It's on forms, people calling in offline, trying to book them, not able to get the slots, the slots getting double booked and etc. of that kind. That was done over a period of time as Jeff covered in his slides. There was limited UX control how those experiences were delivered. So as part of the strategy itself, and thanks to Jeff's team and work, a lot of that work was done on product selection. What tool technology do we use?

How do we take advantage of the things that are already built? How do you select the dealers? Whom do you go after? Who are the the pilot dealers? Which markets do you select? Right. So that was all part of the strategy and rollout in terms of pilot. It was all about what are the features that we are going or prioritizing prioritizing ahead, we rolled out to a limited set of 20 dealers. Simplified UK dealer onboarding happened for a much larger set of dealers, almost 400 to 500 over a period of time earlier this year.

The rollout is planned across the remaining Europe markets, across five key European markets, and rest of the 17 countries would be covered as part of this year rollout. What's in future? Right. This is not that is not a program which was only for short period of time. Future holds. We are adding new channels so folks can request a test drive booking through emails, outlook integration. They can be notified through, uh, through an outlook email box. We are adding E-signatures to it. Dealers have been requesting integration with their dealer management systems so that if they are able to book a test drive into a dealer management system, it's reflective over here.

Or if they are booking into the Pega system, it's actually reflected back into the dealer management system. Right. Dealers are requesting specific customer journeys, which is personalized purely for themselves. And that is something integration with the various dealer management systems. As part of the other experience that I talked to you about, the one that we have done in us, we have already integrated a fair amount of the most complex dealer management systems. So we are taking those learnings from us back to Europe. How do we create those facades? How do we create those architectural patterns? How do we create those data models, reusability and take advantage or accelerate the journey in Europe?

One of the third point over here that you see in the near future is Salesforce integration. So one of the particular countries in Europe has a Salesforce front end where the customer experience is delivered through Salesforce. We are taking advantage of a Salesforce Integration Extender. It's a Pega capability which will allow to port over the work that has already been done as Pega workflows and make them available as part of Salesforce. So that's something that has already been pursued along with the the European markets, and it's planned to be rolled out. What next? Analytics. Once the test drive is over, using GenAI to summarize what the experience was to predict, what's the propensity or likelihood of this customer buying the car in case the customer decides to buy the car, or the propensity is high, which is set by the business users. So business leader can decide if a propensity is above 75% .

I would like a qualified lead to be created into the system, so that goes to a sales force channel or whatever other technologies that they may be using. A qualified lead goes into that particular system, which they can. The sales personnel then can follow up to close the test drive, convert into a real sale. right. In terms of it could it could also be supported by personalized offers. And those offers could be coming from the financial arms of the OEMs. Right. Those are all data and analytics components that the system is planned to host going forward. Global expansion.

Right. Based on the learnings that are there in Europe, how do we take it back to the US market and accelerate the journey of test drives over here, and also take it to the regional Asian markets and other places in the world? So GDPR compliance was a core fundamental requirement, which is expected being it in Europe. We applied what Wipro believes in privacy by design. So right from the very beginning, we included or involved one of our GDPR compliance consultant as part of the team. Or we looked at every single data element, all the PII data. Where are they captured as part of the process? How are they needed and where they are needed as part of the process, how long they are needed as part of the process, and where are they to be kept? For example, the customer ID integration, which is which is called out over here, the customer ID and details are stored in a different system.

It's called CAC in this case and all. It's kind of hashed request into those systems. So you know it's the customer details are basically protected. Not but not but the least in terms of data retention. The last one. Right. If a customer requests for the data to be removed or a regulatory requirement is there for a data to be removed, it has to be a simplistic process where you can drive out all the clean up, all the data. Um, who has access to that data? Who can look?

Who's authorized to look? What way will data be, you know, reflected back to the user? Where will that data be stored? How will it be encrypted and stored, etc. . So that was all part of GDPR compliance, where we're very, very proud of the work that team was able to accomplish. There were no hindrances at all in terms of getting the security clearances as part of this particular program, results and roadmap. I'm sure everybody is excited to hear how the results kind of, you know, across customers, dealers and Ford. I'll let Jeff and Chandra.

What did it mean from customer standpoint? And we talked, as we earlier alluded to, customer centricity, user centered design is key. And for customers a seamless omnichannel booking across any, any sort of the way that they would like to book that and for a vehicle near their geographical location at their convenience, if they want to do a test drive at their home, all of that, what was available for customer, a clear transparency with respect to availability of the sales assistants, the inventory, the kind of vehicles that they want to drive. That's another major plus point for customers. Now let's look at from dealer standpoint. Jeff talked about how we went around interviewing different dealers, understanding the current test drive model. And this is where it's key for a customer experience to think through. What's the current process? What are the gaps in the current process?

How do you shift that current process to something of a transformative? Clearly, for them, the high conversion rates, that's what matters to the dealers and as well as a lot more insights and inputs for them, are true data driven so that they understand their customers much more effectively. For Ford, again, Jeff talked about one of the key area or KPI for Ford are what they researched and understood for electric vehicles. 50% of their, uh, the sales have to come from competitors. And you could see here, uh, Ford pivoted this project thinking around, how do they build this system for that 50% additional conversions and with a with a better test drive experience, we can always imagine that the conversions would get better. And this is much more unified solution, proactive selling, potentially more higher sales through conveniences like test drive at home. So that's the three pillars under which around which this was conceived and conceptualized. Okay, so with that story now, uh, I'll open up for any questions. Jeff.

Sanjeev. Everybody's here if you want to hear out. What was the thought process? The business case, the architecture, the end outcome, the roadmap? We tried to provide most of the pieces of the puzzle. Why this initiative? What's the end outcome we are we're trying to achieve with this initiative, and what are the next steps that we are trying to do? So with that, open to all of you for any questions, any thoughts. I oh the mic I think you got to walk over there.

Well there's a mic right there in the aisle right. You mentioned. Can you hear me? Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned the engagement of the OEMs in this as well. I'd just like to know a little bit more about that, how to how that happened, how you pulled them into that. Or uh. Oh.

The OEM in this case is Ford itself. Oh, okay. You're talking about dealers. How? Well, there's. Dealers, but then there's, you know, okay. If you want to touch upon. Yeah. So, um, so dealers, we pulled in as, as we touched on, on one of the slides in terms of gathering those requirements.

And we, we focused on the UK market first. It's where I'm based. We spoke to that national sales company Ford of Britain. Um took them through the project, what we wanted to achieve and had them, um, agree to select some of those key dealers and big dealers that have got complex systems, Some smaller dealers that have got lower tech solutions so that we can have a real cross section of the dealer view to test drive our test drive system effectively. So that was our sort of piloting to make sure that what we were going to develop. And when we started to develop, we could deploy and demonstrate those components and parts as they were being developed, so that we make sure we was on the right track and we didn't have to go back and re-engineer everything as we moved forward. So I think that was that was one of the key successes that we had is that sort of pilot phase and prototyping and making sure that they were involved in that process, rather than finishing everything with our understanding of their requirements, and then going back to them with a finished product and saying, right now use it. So we took a lot of feedback during that process and changed and tweaked our priorities as we went. And are the dealers paying for this solution, or is it a gift to them?

Because the benefits are to Ford. It's a gift, I suppose you could say. But no, it's it's one of the key things is that we've got this single system that all the dealers are using. It makes the integration between that front end customer experience and and the back end dealer scheduling system a lot simpler if we had to do complex integrations with all of their dealer management systems that don't have scheduling today, it wouldn't work very well. So for a lot of them, it's an improvement in their experience as well. To be able to have a scheduling tool rather than various solutions that they were using, from Excel sheets to whiteboards to diaries. It wasn't a very high tech solution that our dealers were using today. Awesome and better utilization of the resources they are able to, you know, at their individual level, they can decide which resources are available, at what point in time. Yeah, scheduling of resources as well.

Not so not just the the end customer but the dealers resources itself. Yeah, it's economies of scale as well I suppose we've developed a solution once rather than lots of different solutions developed by lots of dealers that we had to integrate with. The CRM communications is developed once agreed and is standardized across a whole market. So from a customer point of view, the whole booking experience, the confirmation emails, and even the test drive experience when you arrive is now standardized for all markets across Europe. And Jeff dealer for dealers. This must be a very new experience. I don't think the rest of your competitors would have a solution like this. At this point in time. There's not many.

Yeah, we're leapfrogging to bring this to to the market, which is a really good place to be ahead of the curve. Um, so yeah, the dealers. The dealers are enjoying this solution. Would their perception or their opinion on Ford as a brand, do you see that? I think they respect to this. Yeah. Dealers definitely appreciate where we're going and what we're doing. Um, I think one of the key challenges we have had is that deployment and utilization of this, um, everyone hates change. So making it as easy and efficient as possible.

Um, all of the onboarding steps were designed with workflow to be as quick and easy as possible, so that there isn't much for them to do when they access this tool. A lot of defaults are set up for them for them to edit away. And so there's not, um, not a huge amount of work for them to, to start using it, which I think was key to it being successful. Great. And the flows are self-guided, like Pega like always. So there the training time was significantly reduced. And the training material and you know, I know you took a world almost like a European tour for that. But still it was significantly compressed onboard onboarding and everything was was still made as simpler as possible for the dealers. Onboarding was, yes, but in terms of training was that was significantly reduced.

I think we have a question. Sorry. Go ahead. Oh, no. Great. Go ahead. You talked about. Well, can you hear me? Okay.

Yeah. Um, you talked about integrating with other systems. I was curious about how you integrating with Salesforce. You mentioned that, um, we have some of those connections that we need to create. Also, even though we want to use Pega, we also need to honor that some of those legacy interactions too. So I wonder if you could elaborate on that. Just I suppose very quickly, Salesforce is, um, a tool that we was using in a particular market as a for the dealer experience. Um, and the customer experience still hadn't moved forward to, to a real time booking, although Salesforce had an inbuilt in-built scheduling tool that wasn't the one that we wanted to to have as a we wanted a headless scheduling tool that was external. So that's why we needed that integration for that market.

Just to add to that, so there were almost all three dimensions of those integrations. One is the Salesforce piece. How do you take those Pega workflows and make them available ? And an architectural decision was made with the after discussion with the enterprise architecture teams. Was that the scheduling tool for this particular test drives would be Pega. So fundamentally, that's the system of record for all the test drives. And Salesforce will kind of come and seek information as required. So that was one integration. The other integration is of course with the local system that I talked about the security and the other aspects.

Right. Sending out notifications, the survey itself with Medallia. So that's the second dimension of it. The third is the path that we are on of integrating with the dealer management systems, where either they book a test drive in Pega through a self-service or other modes, or mobile channels, etc. whichever channel they come through, or were somebody to create it in DMs itself, it will cross interchange. So the information is available on both the systems. We are expecting that one. It will make a lot of that information available to Pega to be able to take decisions and take insights out of that. And second is for dealers, it's seamless, so the risk of change is not that high from that perspective.

Absolutely. Hey, can you hear me? Um, it's very interesting for me. I'm an architect on the North America GXP. So some of the common challenges you mentioned, you know, uh, multiple teams, Salesforce, Pega. I'd love to hear what challenges you. I mean, first of all, great accomplishment, right? You guys are very humble about this, but it's really huge. Um, how did you manage orchestrating that work across all these teams?

The huge amount of risk. That's part one. And the second part is, um, I mean, dealer adoption and how, um, working with all these dealers, how did you competitively position. Um, I mean, sorry, test drive in Europe because North America, you know, Ford is family owned. They're rooted in culture. So it's not the easiest conversation to enroll dealers. So how did you iterate and gain their trust? I would love to learn from that. Look of the dealer.

First I cover the dealer first. Um, so yeah, it really was the the key challenge. As you say, dealers hate change. They they always want to use their own systems. Um, but that was the key to breaking through that barrier, I suppose, is the success of this is, um, expelling the benefits of of what we're doing to them and giving them carrots rather than sticks. It was it could have been really easy for terms and conditions for us to say, you have to use this, you must do this. But it wouldn't mean that that salesperson in the dealer understands that and that behavior change happens. So I think the early piloting that we've done, some of the early work that we did in one particular market, um, gave us some data that we could then feed back to all of the markets and all of the dealer networks in Europe and say, this is what we're seeing through the change, this is what we can deliver. And one of those is the increased conversion from leads to people in the actual sales, um, sales, um, in the dealerships.

Um, so that's really what they want. They want us to give them the leads. They want people to get into their dealerships so that they can sell them vehicles. Um, and then the other data piece that we saw was an increase in sales originating through an online booking experience versus that request experience. So we're hoping that is an early indication of the enhanced customer experience, um, lending itself more to being trusted, to being seen as a more forward thinking brand and then having more sales on the back of that as well. Thank you and congrats to you and your team on unlocking so much value. Thank you. Thanks a lot. And for the second question, that the second part of the question you asked was, uh, coordination with the sales force and other teams, uh, was not easy because the priorities are different in terms of what is lining up.

So almost like a release train kind of conversations where we were able to align the priorities, what were coming out of Jeff's requirements and release requirements, and what the sales force team together was trying to do. It took a decent bit of coordination work. So I will say also at North America, a lot of the same challenges. So that was very valuable. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you. Okay. We are about time.

Thank you very much. Thank you Jeff I appreciate it. Thank you Sanjay. Thank you. So thank you everyone.