Full Speed Ahead!

Our team is nearing the halfway point of our project with the end of Sprint 6, and it’s full speed ahead as we work towards preparing our spring semester deliverables! Most of this sprint was spent summarizing everything we’ve done and learned to create our spring presentation, website (coming soon!), and research report.

Never Enough Research

We can never do enough research, so even as we were thinking about synthesizing our findings, we still found time to squeeze in one more interview with a CarMax sales team. Our goal with this interview was to get the sales consultant’s perspective on the opportunity spaces we had identified and understand their pain points as well as their perspective of customer pain points.

Synthesizing our Research

We’ve conducted a LOT of research this semester (read all about our previous sprints here!), and we’re looking forward to designing our conversational agent around our research insights.

We first revisited our research findings to uncover the insights that will inform our next steps. Our goal was to identify our most relevant insights so that we could see how these might inform our opportunity spaces. We started with off with many ideas of what our insights might be, and it was a long process differentiating what was just a research finding versus a real insight. But revisiting the research evidence (hours of interview recordings filled with interesting customer & sales consultant quotes) and thinking about how they might apply to the opportunity spaces helped us turn our ideas into useful insights.

In the end, through lots of discussions and refinement sessions, we came up with our five key insights about the CarMax customer’s car buying journey:

1. People make a decision on the kind of car that is right for them based on their needs but make a final decision on what to buy based on personal preferences.
2. The hands-on experience validates people’s research and assures them of their decision to purchase a car.
3. When visiting CarMax, people expect to be met where they are in their car buying process.
4. People want the flexibility to choose what role the sales consultant provides in their in-store experience.
5. People want to shop for cars without social pressure but also want information that a sales consultant can provide.

What’s Next?

Our highly anticipated spring presentation, website, and research report took up most of our sprint! We’ve been hard at work designing these, and are excited to give you all a more in depth look into what we’ve been working on. We can’t wait to show off our beautiful website soon, and we’ll see you at our spring presentation in just over one week!

We’re also just starting to look ahead at the summer semester as we dive deeper into thinking about how we’re going to take everything we’ve learned and design this conversational agent. There’s a lot to look forward to to, so get excited and buckle up as we zoom towards the summer!