One brand, seven customer journeys

Nissan was embarking on a global programme of CX transformation, designed to re-orient the business around evolving customer needs. Internally, this meant refocusing their 300-person digital team, aligning a global dealership network, and ensuring any changes were sympathetic to the products themselves, given that manufacturing lead times made the physical design fixed. Nissan's CMO Roel De Vries was direct about what he needed: brand-led customer experiences that felt distinctive and uniquely Nissan.

A year-long experience strategy programme that I planned and executed across three 100-day phases: a brand experience audit across Japan, China, the UK and the USA; defining the future state (global personas, experience principles, desired-state journey mapping, key moment prototyping, a measurement strategy); and vision and rollout. Alongside the project work, I trained the new client-side CX team to deliver the work, and hired a design team into the agency to lead key parts of the design.

We delivered an experience strategy that redefined the end-to-end customer journey, from brand discovery through to ownership, alongside an evaluation and measurement framework for assessing how effectively future design work demonstrated the Nissan brand. Three key moments were rapid-prototyped: a model matchmaker pairing customer behaviours to the range, augmented reality roadside support, and a connected-car first-use app.

During the project, Nissan reorganised itself around seven key customer journeys, bringing cross-functional teams together to serve specific customer needs, including a dedicated focus on the test drive. The transformation also included consolidating more than 200 websites across 100 markets, and a shift from thinking in touchpoints to thinking in journeys.