Where we started:
Not all products start on page one. Development teams had produced forms specific to Lincoln Brand Immersions Registration and essentially we had data from the submissions, a database of information, metrics but nothing really realated to user engagement this was our starting point. No UX/UI Designer was a part of the efforts at that stage. We had a long form with little breaks or informaiton heirarchy, a branded header and somewhat formatted forms for not following standards of practice for form layout/submission user engagement — breaking a lot of rules right out of the gate.

Leveraging the form data was the starting point but the entire current process would need an analytical eye and efforts to apply standars of practice, build out something more engaging and less static and capture usabiltity data moving forward to ensure continued success. Essentially what started as a series of forms for immersion events grew into an entire Lincoln Brand Champion program.

Challenge:
The Lincoln Brand Champion (LBC) program was designed to create a more vested, knowledgeable, and customer-centric team of dealership employees. With Lincoln Motor Company embarking on a full scale Lincoln re-branding, elevating the brand into the luxury market, it was important to ensure that they stayed ahead of the competition. Moving into a higher end market, the attention to detail, exclusivity and brand elevation was a key driving metric. Each interactive touchpoint needed a white-glove feel, an elevated experience and remain highy engaging while building out elevated and refined interactivity.

Spearheading this effort, business-to-business initiatives focusing on the customer facing dealership sales and service professionals were selected to be Lincoln Brand Champions. This was a complete restructuring of the previous deliverables in efforts to support the global business change and knowledge training across all dealerships. From immersion event registration site, to exclusive B-to-B social media groups, to extended phases including shared user stories, and an integrated eMail builder, and extended social media platforms — the expanse of the interactive solutions continually evolved as needs grew. An agile iterative procedss was implemented to accommodate the speed to delivery and accomodate the iterative understanding and depoyment across this new product. It was important to ensure flexibility and adaptability throughout the process.

This highly successful launch engaged hand-selected users, enabled them to share, react, compete and immerse themselves fully into the new Lincoln Motor Company direction. As well, my contributing efforts quadrupled the scope of work and deliverables and worked in building additional teams to support these efforts. Combined efforts saw knowledge sharing, product and sales engagement double. The final solutions exceeded all expectations and has become a platform for other divisions to follow.

Who are our users?:
Retail Dealer Sales / Technician Associates: Leaders in their field with best-in-class sales performance, outgoing, engaging individuals that can be central to deploying and knowledge sharing with the entire sales and service staff. Leaders. Top-Performers. Detail Oriented. Knowledgeable. Highly Engaged.

Service Technicians: Service technicans that are seen as leaders. The LBC program will elevate these leaders offering opportunities to excell in service based luxury markets and change behaviour related to day-to-day customer engagement. Tecnical. Service Oriented. Detial Oriented. Great follow-through.

Processes Used:

• Program Ideation and Discovery
• User Archethypes Traits Analysis
• User Interviews
• Iterative Qualitative Discovery Sessions
• Collaborative Process Ideation
• Informational Hierarchy Reviews/Refinement
• User Technical Analysis: Platform + Components
• Agile, Low-Fidelity Wireframing + Prototype Testing
• Platform + Social Integration + Refinement
• Iterative Stragetic Gamification Integration
• Analytics + Tracking and Performance
  
  

Value in Knowledge Sharing:

• Promote the secret Facebook group and peer-to-peer communications to increase LBC awareness and allow dealers to share best practices to improve customer experiences
• Offer dual dealerships a platform to provide Lincoln customers with a luxury Sales/Service experience that is comparable to a Lincoln-only dealership

Lincoln Brand Champion Program Analysis Methodology and Approach

• An analytic study to assess the impact of the LBC program on Employee Retention and CVP scores was conducted
• Program Reach: When analysis began there were 1,415 Active LBCs spread across 733 dealerships
• The attributes below were considered in their influence on Employee Retention and Customer Sentiment
• These factors were used to segment the analysis to aid in removing influences of possible selection biases

Key Takeaways:

• Overall, LBC customer sentiment Is higher than that of a Non-LBC
• LBCs who have strong engagement on the LBC Portal + Facebook and who participate in immersion course have even higher CVP results
• Dual dealerships can improve CVP scores by offering Lincoln Customers a better Sales and Service Experience through the LBC program