Service Up
Service Up is a tech-enabled auto repair company based in Silicon Valley. They differentiate themselves by offering customers a virtual service advisor, transparent pricing, and the convenience of pick-up and drop-off services for their vehicles. By leveraging technology, Service Up is able to provide a seamless and efficient experience for their customers.
Services
Project Type
Service Up is a tech-enabled auto repair company based in Silicon Valley. They differentiate themselves by offering customers a virtual service advisor, transparent pricing, and the convenience of pick-up and drop-off services for their vehicles. By leveraging technology, Service Up is able to provide a seamless and efficient experience for their customers.
Services
Project Type
After partnering with Lion, Service Up was able to achieve their goal of securing $15 million in Series A funding. Thanks to our expertise, we were able to transform all aspects of Service Up's marketing, product, and brand.
ServiceUp had encountered several significant challenges in their mission to revolutionize car service. They needed to shift customer perceptions about traditional dealerships and local shops, while also providing a more effortless experience for their busy clientele. At this point they lacked an underlying brand strategy, resulting in inconsistencies across branding, logo, marketing, and product. To improve ServiceUp's overall performance, Lion aimed to enhance their design, create a comprehensive go-to-market plan, and expand to every major market in the US. With a series A funding round approaching in the next 3-6 months and no established design operations, time was of the essence.
While the team had created an initial brand there was no strategy or cohesive approach to integrating their essence throughout their marketing and product.
The first marketing site was created by the engineering team and had no content management system for marketing updates. It was not scalable and had no tools for integrating back to analytics.
Similar to challenges with the branding, the first versions of the app did not focus on user experience nor a cohesive integration to the user's journey.
Lion initially diagnosed challenges in a fractured, free-lance oriented team structure and brought best practice design operations consulting to bear.
Due to the lack of focus on understanding users early on, we built a process to develop key insights around personas, user journey, motivation, and buying habits.
To help evolve a slow to change industry, we worked closely with industry veterans to understand the lay of the land for service advisors, end users, and car shops.
A strong focus on leveraging technology from across industries and finding a unique approach to innovation was at the core of our focus.
The venture capital community ended up becoming an important stakeholder in our process, bringing new insights in terms of business model and user experience.
Lion worked closely with ServiceUp for 9 months, conducting thorough discovery and strategy development. Our approach was data-driven and collaborative. We kicked off the project by conducting thorough research, including data analysis and workshops to ensure alignment across the team. One of our key research approaches was to use ServiceUp ourselves, collecting valuable insights around pain points. But more importantly we also gained opportunities to enhance the users’ journey for a tight experience. We also performed secret shopping using the product, creating pseudo experiences to identify areas for improvement.
Car Illiterate
The Car Illiterate group is not knowledgeable about car mechanics or service jargon. They simply want to get their car fixed and feel empowered by the process. They do not want to interact with people who will put fear, uncertainty or doubt into their minds for the purposes of upselling.
Car Lovers
Car Lovers want to ensure their car is well maintained and in the hands of experts. They care about authenticate parts and warranties. We found this user group often times already had a go-to solution but would shop the market to confirm their own belief and made sure they were being treated properly by their trusted resource.
Tech Enthusiasts
Tech Enthusiasts are interested in the most convenient option for car repairs. They are busy and do not want to spend free time taking their car in for service. They also enjoy “hacking” the system and finding technologies that will handle things for them.
Dealer Avoiders
Dealer Avoiders are knowledgeable about car mechanics, however they are skeptical of dealerships and their high-pressure tactics to sell expensive repair services. This group wants ownership of the process to shop around for a better deal.
After graduating from Y combinator, ServiceUp had attempted to develop their brand using free lancers and other connections and other internal resources, which had led them to an unsatisfactory place. External users in our research were confused by the brand, didn’t know who was calling them over the phone and generally had a poor perception of the logo mark, marketing, and overarching service design. We began the branding process by deep diving via workshops to develop the character, understand the voice, tone and feel, and coalesce around a completely refreshed approach to the product’s offering.
With multiple other tech enabled car platforms becoming more ubiquitous, Lion focused heavily on creating a logo mark, which would stand out and communicate core values as well as unique product differentiators. This approach helped the brand find the right niche. The final logo mark focused on the concept of a happy car equals a happy human and that ServiceUp’s approach offered end to end car care with a high end convenience factor.
As ServiceUp was planning their nationwide rollout, we designed various pieces of marketing collateral to support social media: business cards, welcome packs, stickers, car wraps, and uniforms.
Designing an end-to-end journey required a significant emphasis on every touchpoint, whether the interactions were driven through the software experience with service advisors or team members picking up and dropping off the car. Our main objective was to ensure that the service design was consistent with the brand and aligned with the user research insights.
Our design process examined multiple different approaches to marketing pages, landing pages, and other content marketing focused aspects of the website. After concluding our custom design process, we implemented the site from the ground up using WordPress as a headless CMS with a React.js front end, allowing the team to spin up partner pages and landing pages for split tests, partner marketing, and tools to build out custom layouts without needing design support.
Building the ideal estimate experience through the website
The ultimate goal of ServiceUp was to utilize a native application for long term relationship building and a more robust user experience. Through our research and best practices, we focused on the website as a means inform users on how the product worked and to have a low friction estimate creation process as to not force people to the app too early. This allowed a user to progressively become more comfortable with the product offering and interact with a variety of different modalities before installing an application.
With the initial releases of the native application, we focused on making a frictionless experience that was intuitive and powerful. As users were not accustomed to using apps for car repairs, and given that a car is the second most valuable asset in most households, we recognized we needed to build a system that was easy to understand yet powerful. We needed a system that fulfilled the brand vision of a more simple experience that was transparent and leveraged other disruptive technologies such as a driver picking up your car to get it fixed and then returning it to your home or workplace.
To support the launch and user growth, Lion worked on both the marketing and application fronts to integrate tools to support and maintain growth with a low customer acquisition cost and a optimized customer lifetime value.
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We help the top companies succeed in the digital age.
We help the top employees succeed in the digital age.