Who’s Driving This Customer Journey?

“Have you ever had trouble with your automobile?”  —Adam and the Ants (“Car Trouble”)

I’ll admit something publicly that all my friends would know about me intuitively. I am not a car guy. Not even a little bit. It’s slightly ironic since I love car songs. “Little Red Corvette!” OK, well maybe that one is really about…um…something else. How about “Pink Cadillac”? Hmm, maybe that is also not purely about automobiles. “Drive My Car,” then? Oy vay—even the Beatles aren’t safe. Well, there’s Rihanna’s “Shut Up and Drive.” Ooof. Maybe my musical tastes don’t really run in the direction of songs that are truly describing the joys of automobiles and American car culture. Apologies to the Beach Boys.

While I’m not into cars, I do own one. I’m in my mid-50s and this is the first new car I’ve ever owned. It’s an electric car, and one of the reasons I bought it was to reduce my interactions with as many car-related things and places as possible. No more gas station visits! I can’t remember the absence of something in my life causing such joy as my non-visits to gas stations over the past few years. Auto repair shops—another place I was looking forward to avoiding.

And, for the most part, we’ve been able to steer well clear of speaking to mechanics and service department managers. But my luck recently ran out. A charging unit in my car failed and I could no longer use my home charger. I could still use commercial fast chargers, though expensive and inconvenient. But even that was a short-term fix as, according to the literature I found online, the problem could eventually lead to my car just losing power mid-drive. So, off to the dealer.

That trip to the dealer introduced me to something I hadn’t expected. The dealership had apparently decided that several traditional dealership activities were no longer dealership activities.

They had no shuttle to take me home after I dropped off the car. Instead, the service adviser summoned an Uber. Fair enough. The driver arrived and transported me home, with no car songs on the radio to taunt me.

Then it became clear that the repair would take a few days and I’d need a loaner. Except they had no loaners. The dealer arranged a rental car through a national rental agency instead. Again, this worked. Eventually.

You can make a solid business case for all of it. The dealership is there to fix cars, not operate a tiny bus company or manage a fleet of vehicles that customers will inevitably return with an empty coffee cup rolling around under the passenger seat. Uber is better at rides. Rental companies are better at rentals. The dealer can focus on the charging unit that decided it was taking the summer off.

But that isn’t how the experience felt from my side. I wasn’t having a dealership experience, an Uber experience, and a rental car experience. I was having one experience called “My Car Is Broken and I Still Need to Go Places.” And that experience now had extra handoffs, extra apps, extra confirmation numbers, and extra opportunities for somebody to shrug and say the problem belonged to somebody else.

Maybe the dealer was doubling down on its core competency. Maybe it was washing its hands of the less profitable parts of the service journey. Probably a little of both. Yes, the car got fixed, which is obviously the main thing. Still, the whole process felt less like a well-orchestrated customer journey and more like a group project where nobody volunteered to be in charge.

So maybe “Drive My Car” was the right song after all. I just wasn’t sure whose car, who was driving, or which app I needed to open.

Ian Jacobs is vice president and lead analyst at Opus Research.

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