Volvo

Business Challenge

Volvo was preparing to introduce a new feature in the Volvo Cars app to support electric car customers – public charging. With this feature, a Volvo driver can easily find, start, stop, and pay for charging in one place, instead of having multiple apps.

The research team initially conducted an internal beta test of the new feature with Volvo employees but then realized they needed more information to remove risk and make necessary adjustments prior to launch. In particular, they needed feedback from a geographically dispersed group so they could assess the app’s reliability in regions of the United States with less ubiquitous charging infrastructures. For feedback to be trustworthy, it was essential to ensure all research participants were current users of the Volvo Cars app.

Solution

Stakeholders in Volvo’s product development organization regularly partner with the market research team to connect with the community through surveys, video feedback, focus groups, and in-depth interviews. Volvo has an active customer insight community of pre-vetted electric car lovers who are willing and excited to share their perspectives and experiences.

Rapid segmentation and recruiting

Because members of the community are deeply profiled, Volvo can segment research participants based on demographic and geographic attributes, among other factors gathered through surveys and internal customer databases. To test the new app feature, this rich data helped the research team quickly curate and recruit users of the Volvo Cars app in different regions of the country with diverse charging networks, charging speeds, and amenities around charging stations.

Volvo released the new feature to community members six weeks prior to the full launch. During that time, customers tested the feature and shared their feedback on the user experience. Alida’s sentiment tracker allowed the research team to analyze open-ended survey questions, segment data, and summarize results.

In fact, user feedback identified a few bugs, which developers quickly resolved before the feature was exposed to a much larger audience.

Interactive feedback from the same group of beta testers

“Iterative design and testing is extremely valuable,” says Nick Masci, a product manager responsible for the Volvo app. Right before Volvo launched the new feature, they thanked the community for their involvement in driving the changes. Customers were able to go into the app and see their immediate impact. “This ‘sharing back’ shows that we’re not just looking at the survey results, but actually taking action,” says Nick. “It validates to the members that they are important.”

Even after the public launch of the new charging feature, Volvo continues to engage with the same community members who were part of the original beta test. Group retention and survey response rates are much higher than average, as this group is hungry to stay involved in Volvo’s development plans. Since the beta test, Volvo has conducted five more surveys with the same community members, regarding post-launch enhancements; they averaged a 45% response rate.

In one case, Nick explains, “as we were building our product roadmap, we were considering an enhancement, but we first wanted to determine if users really saw the value.” Only two weeks after identifying the need, Volvo executed a targeted survey. By noon the first day they already had over 200 responses.

Results

As studies such as these are shared globally throughout Volvo’s commercial digital organization, the desire for customer feedback is growing exponentially. In addition to product development, stakeholders in Volvo’s marketing, branding, and customer experience functions also utilize the customer communities to generate new ideas for innovations and validate their hypotheses and prototypes.

“Once they know about the communities and that it’s basically free to them, they want to use these resources more and more,” says Lisa Eig of Volvo’s Launch and Strategy team. “With our customers we get into some of the really deep information in terms of their thought process, their journey ideas, and also some of their frustrations and pain points,” says Lisa.

Moving forward, the research team has been gathering customer feedback via video and creating a showreel to share with stakeholders as part of their results presentation. Instead of simply having data on a slide, stakeholders can see customers’ facial expressions and tone of voice to make a bigger impact. Lisa loves how simple it is to use. “Alida makes it really easy to highlight parts of the transcript so I can easily cut and paste and become a video editor.”

For the app as well as other aspects of the Volvo experience, community feedback has been instrumental in driving company’s roadmap. “It builds value for our users and ensures we’re solving their pain points,” Nick reports.

Volvo’s approach to embedding the customers' voice has a direct impact on business goals. The quick turnaround means they can bring new innovations to market much faster than previously possible and launch features with confidence.