Key insights and findings
The research pointed to several strategic themes. Motorway needed a clear articulation of its target end-to-end customer experience — not just individual product features, but the full service vision including what happens between digital touchpoints and behind the scenes.
This meant shifting from siloed product thinking to service thinking: how do the pieces fit together across the full seller and dealer journey?
Reducing unnecessary internal communication would directly free CS agents to focus on customers. Account Managers and Sales teams needed better, more accessible data tools. And the post-sale process — sale finalisation, transport, payments, and collection — needed significant attention as the single physical touchpoint in an otherwise digital service.
The beginning section of the Motorway service blueprint I created
Problems in customer support
Lack of problem ownership
I mapped what each of the seven CS&S teams actually did day-to-day — their tasks, tools, where they sat in the overall process, and how they interacted with other teams.
Seller teams only communicated with sellers; dealer teams only with dealers. This siloed approach meant that resolving most issues required significantly more internal coordination and resource, extending resolution times.
This cross-team view made the systemic nature of the problems visible: it wasn’t any single team failing, but the gaps between teams and the absence of shared information creating friction at almost every stage.
Dealer Support team covered the end-to-end process for dealers (buyers) only
The CSS team's focus was on pre sale activities and on the seller side only
Transparency gaps
While Zendesk had been introduced to improve visibility, the implementation appeared to be a 'lift and shift' from previous Slack-based workflows. Teams had limited insight into what was happening in CRM or with cases owned by other groups, leading to duplicated effort and customer frustration.
Transport and timeframe frustrations
Dealers experienced pain around delays at multiple points: the time taken for sellers to accept bids, delays in clearing the review of seller documentation, and slow transport logistics. These compounding delays created cash-flow challenges for dealers and eroded trust in the service.
Better hardware and account access for agents
The South African agents had old small monitors. The apps rendered terribly on smaller screens, leaving them to find long workarounds to complete what should have been simple actions.
Internet access was also slow, and the app loaded full resolution images that were not used by the team.
I shared this with other product teams who contributed various sections within the Dashboard product and established a best practice for ways to build for smaller desktop screens.
Illustrating the screen resolution issue between the two offices
A typical desk in the Durban office
Problems in product
Streamline the post-sale process
Motorway had zero product presence at this crucial stage of the transaction. Sales finalisation, transport, payments, and collection represented the critical physical touchpoint in the service. Improving this phase would have an outsized impact on customer satisfaction.
*Turns out this took a few years for the business to eventually look into.
How many different front of house and back of house teams could make up touchpoints at the crucial collection stage
Dashboard information architecture
The internal Dashboard had grown organically over time without a coherent vision. Using the mapping of what sections of the app were used by what teams, we modified the roles and permissions of certain user groups.
A screenshot of top of the Dashboard page on a UK Agent screen
The smaller viewport of the Dashboard page on a South African Agent screen
Mapping the various segments of dashboard used by various teams, we'd use this to help tailor access to each role type
Screen space was poorly utilised, information was difficult to locate, and there was no clear framework for how new product features should integrate with the agent experience.
*Some work was done to improve and fine-tune the legacy product, along with some standard design guidelines for teams to follow when building out the product further.
Disconnected tooling
With work split between Dashboard and Zendesk, agents lacked clarity on which system to use for what purpose. There was no cohesive vision for how these tools should work together to support customer service operations.
There was patchy automated logging of certain tasks, meaning agents needed to manually type update notes in Zendesk and Dashboard. A specific pain point at the time for the pre-sale team was an image resupply process.
Data accessibility for sales teams
Account Managers expressed a need for better BI tools to access client data on the go. The existing Google Dashboard was too granular and required manager intervention to access detailed reporting — a clunky process that reduced time available for client-facing activities.
