Accelerating the digital retail experience for automobile shopping

Overview

RouteOne’s mission is to use technology to improve the Finance and Insurance (F&I) process for automobile dealers. The FinTech company sought help from Slalom Build to transform its dealer-focused operating model to support those who are shopping for or purchasing an automobile online. The result is RouteOne Fusion, a business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) application set to transform the vehicle finance industry.

Scope

Scope Product Strategy, Software Engineering, Experience Design, Data Engineering

Technology

Angular, Typescript, Java, Oracle DB, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Jira, Gherkin, Postman, Figma

Driving the business in changing conditions

RouteOne is a FinTech joint venture formed over twenty years ago by Ally Financial, Ford Motor Credit Company, TD Auto Finance, and Toyota Financial Services. Its services, currently used by well over 14,000+ automobile dealerships in the US and Canada, give dealers access to one of the largest networks of finance sources and Dealership Service Providers (DSP). RouteOne’s mission is to improve the Finance and Insurance (F&I) process and be the point of sale choice for financing within a dealership.

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As more consumers move their automobile shopping and purchasing online, the company needed a way to transform their existing operating model to address this shift. This is a highly competitive, ever-evolving space with dealers focusing on meeting the modern buyer's technology expectations.

RouteOne sought support building around the platform’s core B2B solutions to create a B2B2C application that addresses the unique needs of dealers wishing to deliver a stellar customer experience that is consistent both in-store and online.

We decided that what we wanted to do is make a full end-to-end consumer-facing experience. Eventually the customer could buy a vehicle from a specific dealership without actually going into that dealership.

— Amanda George, Chief Product Officer, RouteOne

The right co-pilot for the journey

RouteOne chose to hop in the front seat with Slalom Build to design, develop, and test the new application. In addition, they turned to Go-to-Market and Dealership Engagement teams from Slalom for expertise to create a complete product launch, sales, and support solution.

Together, we hit the road fully aware of how vital product design has been for RouteOne’s success. Customer experience was given the utmost importance as RouteOne placed a high value on this element of their offering. We got to work, focusing on reinventing RouteOne’s existing tools for dealers to be of benefit to their customers.

RouteOne saw this very clearly as an endeavor that was going to define the future of what they were doing, and they chose us to help them on that journey. They did that because of our obsessiveness with customer experience.

— Alan Blosl, Senior Consultant, Slalom

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Multi-apps are in the rear view mirror

Our team used Angular to make use of RouteOne’s existing code and push out what was most essential for the customer-focused app. Builders leveraged the company’s existing services, tying them together and building new elements around them. The next step was to design the user experience to be a single service from the customer’s perspective.

For the UI, we collaborated on a checklist with specific activities a customer would need to take each step of the way, then tied this into the experience RouteOne sought to deliver with their new app.

Shopping on the online superhighway

Our close collaboration resulted in RouteOne Fusion, a robust product integrated into hosted a dealership's website that empowers customers and provides an exceptional experience for a highly complex activity.

Key features of RouteOne Fusion include:

User journey tracking. Navigation gives customers visibility into the steps that have been completed, which are in progress, and which are yet to be started.
Calculate payment. The user’s zip code is used to prequalify with dealer-approved rates for accurate tax and fees calculation.
Build & price with F&I products. Select aftermarket products curated from a customer survey can be marketed. Customers are able to add and remove products.
Vehicle trade-in. Customers can add a trade-in vehicle to the existing vehicle payoff amount.
Online credit application processing. An external link to the credit application is provided to close out the digital experience.

From the dealership’s perspective, RouteOne Fusion easily fits into their existing processes and is designed to increase sales volumes. Employees are empowered to work with increased efficiency, spend more time selling, maximize sales goals, and elevate the customer experience. What’s more, smaller dealerships are better able to compete with their larger competitors with a technology solution to level up their capabilities.

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The road ahead

Going forward, RouteOne has incorporated new methods to unify product design across the entire company. Our team also assisted the company in growing the product offering over time with enhanced functionality and additional options for dealers.

RouteOne Fusion is set to provide an alternative to dealers as they evolve their businesses to meet ever-changing customer needs. Most importantly, customers and dealers alike appreciate the reduced complexity and greater digitization of a previously demanding and complicated in-person shopping experience.

After two years of collaboration, the company is primed to generate additional revenue from this dynamic new offering, advancing its plans for continued innovation. There are a slew of new innovative features planned and are considering additional integrations for future release to ensure RouteOne remains a leader in this space.

The Slalom team has been really great. They brought a lot of fantastic knowledge and are reliable folks who help us to continually move the project forward and ask good questions as we are trying to dive into things that maybe are a bit outside of our immediate comfort zone.