Our guide on how to enhance the automotive customer journey (+ best practices)

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    Quick Summary 

    We break down how large automotive organizations can enhance the customer journey—step by step. From mapping every touchpoint to aligning teams and tracking impact, we show you how to turn complex experiences into structured, scalable systems. Whether you're in CX, product, or strategy, you’ll learn how to identify what matters, act quickly, and deliver results—powered by journey management tools like TheyDo.

    Looking to revamp how your automotive brand wins and keeps customers?

    Car buyers don’t just walk into a dealership anymore. They explore, compare, and expect seamless experiences at every touchpoint. In fact, 95% of vehicle buyers use digital sources for information, and twice as many start their research online compared to visiting a dealership.

    In this TheyDo article, we break down the automotive customer journey—why it’s essential, how to improve it, and what best-in-class execution looks like. But first…

    Why listen to us?

    At TheyDo, we empower large enterprises to align cross-functional teams through AI-driven journey management, enhancing decision-making speed and boosting productivity.

    For instance, Amtrak revitalized its customer experience using our tools, creating cross-functional collaboration, aligning teams around shared goals, and creating actionable roadmaps to enhance customer journeys. 

    What is the automotive customer journey?

    The automotive customer journey maps how people interact with a brand from the moment they consider buying a car to long after they own it. It spans research, purchase, service, and retention.

    Each step reveals what customers expect, and where businesses fall short. That includes dealership visits, financing, mobile experiences, and after-sales support.

    Why is the automotive customer journey important?

    Companies that manage this customer journey well don’t just sell more cars, but also build loyalty, uncover hidden revenue, and stay ahead in a market where experience often outweighs product.

    • Buyers expect more: From digital research to in-store service, customers judge every step. Miss the mark, and they move on fast.

    • Margins are tight: Mapping the journey helps spot inefficiencies in sales, service, and support. This allows you to save time and costs across departments.

    • Loyalty drives revenue: A smooth experience builds long-term trust and makes it easier to retain customers over multiple vehicle lifecycles.

    • Teams stay aligned: A shared journey map keeps product, marketing, and service focused on solving the same customer problems.

    How to enhance your automotive customer journey

    1. Map the journey across all channels 

    If you don’t know the full journey, you can’t fix what’s broken. That’s why mapping every customer touchpoint—digital and physical—is the foundation of any serious CX strategy in automotive.

    Start by building a single view of the customer experience across channels, devices, and departments. Avoid mapping in silos. A unified journey structure helps spot overlaps, handoff issues, and moments where customers drop off.

    We make it easy for teams to map customer journeys that are clear, connected, and built for action. With our customer journey mapping tool, you can:

    • Visualize the full experience: Map every stage of the journey across channels, products, and personas. This way, teams stay aligned on what customers actually go through.

    • Collaborate without silos: Work together in real-time to update journeys, add insights, and keep everyone on the same page.

    • Spot friction and unlock value: Quickly identify pain points and surface the opportunities that matter most for your business and your customers.

    When mapping, break the journeys into key stages:

    • Awareness: How do people first encounter your brand?

    • Consideration: What research tools or channels do they use?

    • Purchase: Where does the transaction happen—online, offline, or both?

    • Ownership: How are onboarding, service, and communication handled?

    • Loyalty: What triggers retention or defection?

    Each stage should highlight goals, emotions, actions, and pain points, focusing on real customer behavior rather than internal assumptions. Use data from research, support tickets, and analytics to ensure it's accurate and grounded.

    Lastly, structure the map around how your customers experience the journey—not your org chart. You’re not just visualizing steps, but also uncovering friction and context. That clarity is what drives improvement later.

    Done right, mapping sets up everything else. It’s how teams shift from reacting to CX problems to proactively designing journeys that work.

    2. Identify pain points and high-impact opportunities 

    Once your journeys are mapped, your next move is to dig into the data behind them. Every drop-off, delay, or complaint is a signal. Your job is to find the patterns that matter.

    Start by connecting qualitative and quantitative insights. Interviews, support tickets, NPS feedback, and session recordings all help expose friction. But volume alone isn’t enough—you need to link issues to journey stages to understand the impact.

    This is where we shine. By structuring insights within the journey map, we help teams surface not just problems, but patterns worth solving. Our Journey AI feature speeds this up by processing inputs and surfacing recurring themes automatically.

    For instance, Vinted used our Journey AI platform to turn 10 years of user research into actionable insights, improving their checkout experience for 70M+ users.

    quote
    The game-changer with Journey AI is that it allows you to instantly visualize user interviews. I can immediately extract the pains and gains of whichever user I’m talking to.
    Arnas Levickas

    Arnas Levickas

    Senior Product Manager, Vinted

    Look for issues that hit critical points like:

    • High intent moments (e.g. test drive booking, financing)

    • Key transitions (e.g. digital to dealer, or purchase to onboarding)

    • Drop-off zones with no follow-up

    Prioritize based on business impact, customer frustration, and effort to resolve. You don’t need to solve everything. You need to solve the right things first.

    Finally, make opportunity spotting repeatable. Set up regular reviews of journey data, not just quarterly customer reports. The sooner you see a signal, the faster you can act.

    Finding pain is easy. Connecting it to outcomes is what separates busywork from strategic CX work.

    3. Align cross-functional teams around prioritized customer needs 

    No single team owns the customer journey, but plenty can break it. Alignment across departments is where most transformation efforts stall, especially in large automotive organizations.

    Once you’ve identified key opportunities, bring all the relevant teams into the same conversation. This isn’t just a kickoff meeting. It’s an ongoing, structured collaboration around the journey itself.

    At TheyDo, we support this by giving product, CX, marketing, and ops teams a shared space to view and act on customer journeys. That shared context keeps priorities grounded in real customer needs instead of internal agendas.

    Take Randstad, for example. Operating in 39 countries, they used our platform to align teams around a shared, candidate-first journey. What used to take multiple meetings now happens in a single session—helping local teams validate fast and scale solutions globally.

    To build alignment that sticks:

    • Anchor discussions in customer journey stages, not team roadmaps.

    • Assign opportunity ownership to teams based on where they influence the journey.

    • Use a single, centralized platform to capture all input and decisions.

    Avoid over-indexing on documentation. You want to reduce back-and-forth and get faster at solving the right problems.

    Teams that stay aligned ship better experiences, with fewer delays and misfires. And in a market where switching costs are low, that kind of speed and focus translates directly to competitive advantage.

    4. Design targeted improvements for key journey stages 

    Not every friction point needs a full redesign. Fix what matters most at the right moment, for the right customer segment.

    Start by narrowing the focus to 2–3 high-impact journey stages. These are often where conversion drops, service complaints spike, or handoffs fail. Each problem should tie directly to an opportunity you've already validated.

    Use journey data and cross-functional input to design interventions that are specific, testable, and realistic to implement. Avoid vague solutions like “improve the app”. Make sure to clarify what exactly needs to change and why.

    In TheyDo, you can link opportunities to journey stages, personas, or business objectives. That makes it easier to spot overlap and ensure you’re not solving the same problem in five places.

    When drafting solutions, ask:

    • Does this directly address a known customer pain point?

    • Can we prototype or test it quickly?

    • Who owns it, and how will we track results?

    Design isn’t about volume—it’s about clarity and control. The tighter your link between journey insights and action, the faster you can iterate and scale improvements that actually work.

    5. Implement changes with integrated tools and workflows 

    The best-designed improvements don’t matter if they never ship. Implementation is where CX work gets real, and where many teams slow down or stall.

    Start by translating journey improvements into clear, trackable initiatives. Each solution should have a defined owner, a deadline, and a connection back to the journey stage it supports.

    This is where integrated platforms like TheyDo help operationalize CX. By syncing with tools like Jira and Qualtrics, we turn journey-based opportunities into active tickets, streamlining handoff between CX, product, and engineering.

    To keep delivery aligned with the journey:

    • Push journey insights directly into your project management system.

    • Link each initiative to the specific pain point it solves.

    • Review journey-based work alongside backlog grooming and sprint planning.

    Avoid overloading your teams with too many disconnected tasks. Prioritize initiatives that deliver the highest ROI for both customers and the business. Speed and impact—not volume—should guide delivery decisions.

    Lastly, close the loop. Tag each implementation back to the journey map so future teams understand what changed and why. CX becomes more agile when changes are visible, trackable, and easy to build on.

    6. Continuously measure impact and iterate based on feedback 

    Improvement doesn’t stop at launch. If you don’t measure impact, you’re just guessing. To close the loop, build measurement into your journey work from day one.

    Focus on tracking outcomes tied to specific journey stages. Look beyond general KPIs and tie your metrics directly to the pain points you set out to solve.

    To keep feedback loops tight:

    • Set a cadence for reviewing journey insights and progress.

    • Monitor both customer sentiment and operational metrics.

    • Flag stages where expected improvements haven’t materialized.

    Most importantly, treat each round of feedback as fuel, not failure. When journey data lives in one place, iterations become faster, smarter, and easier to coordinate across teams.

    Best practices for enhancing the automotive customer journey 

    Treat journey management as ongoing infrastructure

    Too many teams treat customer journey work as a single initiative—map it once, check the box, and move on. That’s a mistake.

    In large organizations, customer expectations constantly change, new channels emerge, and organizational structures evolve. To keep up, treat journey management as an operating system. This means regularly maintaining and updating journeys as a shared resource to stay aligned and effective.

    It should be as routine as backlog grooming or quarterly planning.

    Use the same journey taxonomy across departments

    If product, CX, and marketing each define customer journeys differently, you’re building silos—not alignment.

    A shared taxonomy keeps everyone grounded in the same structure. At TheyDo, we help teams anchor journey work in a common language across personas, markets, and business units. That consistency makes handoffs cleaner and collaboration easier, especially at scale.

    When everyone speaks the same “journey language,” work moves faster.

    quote
    It’s a continuous challenge to keep everyone in the loop regarding the added value for both customer and business. Luckily, managing journeys helps everyone to align.
    Mustafa Gurel

    Mustafa Gurel

    Customer Experience Specialist, Van Lanschot Kempen

    Don’t over-document

    Polished journey maps are nice, but they’re not the goal. Action is.

    Focus on capturing enough context to make decisions, not to impress stakeholders. Prioritize clarity over beauty. Keep documentation lightweight and structured to support real-time updates.

    If the map’s too polished to edit, no one will use it.

    Tie every opportunity to a measurable outcome

    You’re not just collecting ideas, you’re deciding what to build. Every opportunity you act on should be tied to a specific journey moment and a measurable outcome.

    Will it reduce time-to-purchase? Boost first-service satisfaction? Improve retention at renewal?

    If you can’t measure it, it’s not ready to move forward.

    Assign ownership by journey stage

    Organizational charts don’t reflect how customers move through experiences. If onboarding spans product, support, and dealer ops, who owns that stage?

    Assign journey ownership based on the customer flow, not internal roles. This gives teams clear responsibility without creating turf wars. It also helps spot gaps where no one is currently accountable.

    Manage your automotive customer journey better with TheyDo

    Enhancing the automotive customer journey is all about building a repeatable system for finding and fixing what matters. The steps we’ve covered give teams the clarity to act and the structure to scale. That’s where we fit in.

    TheyDo is a journey management platform built for complex, cross-functional organizations. Our tools and features help teams map, manage, and improve customer journeys in one place—aligning efforts, surfacing opportunities, and tracking impact every step of the way.

    Start turning customer insight into action at scale today!