HD360: Hastings Deering Customer App

Background

In late 2021 Sime Darby Industrial conducted a 3 month discovery period for it’s Australian Caterpillar dealership Hastings Deering.

This involved conducting interviews and focus groups with Hastings Deering customers throughout the Queensland and Northern Territory to better understand their business and their experiences dealing with Hastings Deering.

The findings from this discovery period informed the product roadmap for the next 2 to 3 years, resulting in the new customer app HD360.

Key research findings

1. Customer service was very poor and wait times on phone for support was a huge source of frustration.
2. Customers had little to no visibility on things like the credit status, invoices and delivery timeframes for machine and parts orders.
3. The Customer portal was web only and primitive by modern standards and almost none of their customers were using it.

The mandate for HD360 was to create a self-serve experience for the customer to alleviate an over reliance on phone support often resulting in long and frustrating phone calls to customers service.

Design Process

Now that we had a healthy backlog of features that came from the customer feedback, I worked closely with the Product Owners to define those features for development.

With any new feature I began a discovery period to understand the problem we were solving from both a customer and business lens which included the following activities:

• Workshop with cross-functional team
• Creating design artifacts:
  • Customer journey maps & user-flows
  • Building the information architecture map
  • Low fidelity wireframes
• Conducting interviews with customers & business subject matter experts (SMEs)
• Creating prototypes (Figma) for testing with customers & business SMEs
• Design handover workshop with technical leads, developers & QA team

UI Design

HD360 was launched with 3 core feature sets.

1. Assets: Allowed customers to manage their Caterpillar machine fleet.
   1. They can see, machine health data, geo location map, service history, warranty information
2. Finance: Gave customers access to the invoices and credit limit statuses
3. Parts Tracker: Track the status of their parts orders

The UI designs were built in Figma and utilizing our design system.

Post launch optimisation (ongoing)

After the launch of HD360 to the public we routinely sort customer feedback to find out what was working, what was not working and what could be improved.

This is done using various UX research methods:

• Data & analytics
• 1 on 1 customer interviews
• Focus groups
• In-app surveys
• Feedback via customer support tickets & phone calls
• Feedback via sales reps