an award-winning automotive digital experience platform

KGM Global (formerly SsangYong Motor Company) is a Korean car manufacturer specialising in 4x4s, SUVs and pick-up trucks. KGM Motors UK is the official importer and distributor of KGM vehicles, parts, and accessories for the UK market. 2024 has seen the company undergo a dramatic transformation, implementing a new management team and a growth strategy focusing on the expansion of its dealer network in 2024. A key part of this plan was to develop a new digital experience platform (DXP) for the brand that made use of a composable architecture.

KGM selected Visarc for the project because of our strong track record in automotive, excellence in branding and web development, integrated digital marketing, and long-standing experience with Umbraco.

challenge

One of the main content creation challenges faced by the brand with its previous website was that many areas of it were simply not manageable from within the content management system (CMS). Core pages were, but the components were basic, whereas other parts of the system required change requests to be logged, and lead times to be factored in. The standard kind of issues that agencies find when looking to replace older sites.

When conducting our user experience testing (which turned up many actionable insights) we noted that some of the old website's features were simply not available at smaller screen sizes. As a result, many valuable actionable insights were identified from the testing.   

As part of the research process we also built-out and monitored funnels and video sessions with Lucky Orange. This revealed bottlenecks within a specific stage of the car configurator. It was clear that certain design decisions with the engine and transmission selection stage had been confusing for users, causing them to exit the process at a significantly higher rate than at previous stages. This theory was confirmed when watching session play backs which clearly revealed customer satisfaction issues.

Whilst there was significant opportunity to improve the user journey and the presentation layer of the website, the marketing team at KGM also saw a huge opportunity to extend the number of touchpoints the company has with its customer base. The national website needed to be more than a glorified brochure; it would become a key part of the automaker's customer experience strategy. At the time, the DXP project kicked off the company’s CRM plan was also receiving an overhaul, so it made sense for the two developments to flow together.

Working closely with KGM and their customer relationship management (CRM) implementation partner, our digital team scoped the possibility of creating a secure customer login area. The idea would allow owners to login and manage their vehicle data, their services, and communicate with KGM via one unified interface, potentially offering personalized content at scale

A further challenge to unified communications, particularly with regards to more time-sensitive offers was the ability to time the delivery of content with time sensitive messaging across the websites of all dealers within the national dealer network. The incumbent system did not have an automated syndication feature which meant that often the national website and the dealer websites were not perfectly synchronised.

The final business objective that needed to be resolved as part of the digital customer experience platform was the management of the official dealer networks used car stock. The incumbent supplier’s system ran on a subdomain of the main national website. There were SEO advantages to integrating it within the main domain so we set about building a scalable modular used car solution that despite sitting on separate infrastructure, would feel integral to a single platform. Being well-established within the industry we knew whatever we built would need to be flexible, with some smaller dealers directly managing their stock within Autotrader, whilst others manage it from their group website or via a dealer management system (DMS).

our approach

usability and performance improvements

After completing an extensive research phase our design studio and system architects set to work. A great deal of thought went into the design of the new website from a usability perspective, this is true for both the visitor experience and the content management system experience. A customised Umbraco back office allows the KGM team to manage and update content easily using Umbraco Block Grid, enabling them to create campaign landing pages in hours rather than days. For visitors, the mobile-first design is excellent for casually browsing on the go. Where possible, form fields were reduced down to a minimum, and field order was optimised against usability testing data we had previously collected to improve visit to lead conversion rate.

Significant time also went into improving the technical performance of the platform, with incremental gains being made throughout the project life-cycle including lazy loading of images, AVIF image format support, and various JavaScript optimisations. We also managed to deliver cost savings by losslessly optimising the most heavily played video assets and adaptively offloading them to a specialist content delivery network (CDN).

digital car service history and aftersales customer portal

Enabling a personalized experience that worked across all channels was a key deliverable within the scope of the project. The advanced entity management features within the clients CRM enables one to many relationships between customers and cars to be displayed within the KGM Customer Zone, a very handy asset management feature for those running a small fleet of vehicles. This digital garage enables two-way communication between the customer and the brand, it displays useful information such as the next planned service date for each car, its warranty status as well as useful video content specific to each model. The Customer Zone also records customer selections regarding their preferred dealer as well as their wider marketing communications opt-ins supporting contextual personalization and a GDPR compliant approach to marketing. With regular logins on the rise there are several other benefits.

• The customer zone enables tailored on site campaigns promoting value added services such as extended warranties and service plans.
• By encouraging users to login, identity merging can occur leading to more accurate web analytics data, better targeting and increased customer loyalty.

consistent information across a network of dealer websites

The KGM project taps into various Umbraco Cloud features, with recently released Baselines being a key one. This allows new dealer websites to be deployed in a templated yet flexible fashion. Parameters populate the variable elements and updates are managed at a Baseline level. One of the key issues with the old platform was that new dealer websites took a long time to deploy, a further challenge was that content was sometimes out of date across the network. These issues are resolved with the new system.

• Key product data points and product pages are managed centrally within the digital platform and syndicated out to the network automatically.
• Offers are also centrally managed and syndicated in the same way.
• Dealers have the ability to create some of their own digital content via an interface that is easy for non-technical users to navigate. This allows dealerships to add value to their domain and enables a wide range of search terms to be targeted.
• Core page meta are data driven and optimised towards geographically targeted searches.

a future-proof used car solution

The used car platform is a proprietary system which offers a bespoke KGM branded consumer front-end that is integrated into the national and dealer network websites via JavaScript embeds resulting in seamless integrations. All dealers that have joined the platform are also given access to the back office to manage and edit their inventory, though we expect that many will integrate via the Autotrader OEM Used Vehicle Locator (UVL) data feed.

The KGM used platform allows consumers to explore used car stock across the dealer network using a variety of filters. For dealers that do not use enriched data provided by third parties, one of the additional business benefits of using the KGM used car platform is that it will enrich vehicle data automatically based on the vehicle registration number (VRN) that is added when creating a new vehicle.

As a modular solution, there is scope to extend the solution further to offer more pre-built integrations with dealer management systems (DMS) and digital commerce workflows.

results

Those familiar with some of our other content may recall that KGM recently rebranded from SsangYong. This web design and development project ran in parallel with the rebrand, meaning that we had to launch a redesigned national website, implement new content and change domain name all at the same time. A real challenge from an SEO perspective, but necessary to deliver the project on time.

Since going live results have been strong with the redesigned online presence positively impacting many KPIs. From an organic search perspective, the domain transition ran smoothly. From the start of June to the end of August clicks from Google have up over what they were in 2023. Once visitors reach the website their propensity to convert has also been greater with an astonishing 449.6% more brochures being requested over the same period. This is great news for KGM which is carefully developing its customer journey mapping and expanding its investment across marketing platforms to deliver more valuable customer interactions.

In addition to the positive reception from search engines and more importantly consumers, the KGM digital experience platform has also received praise from a jury of experts at the annual international Umbraco Awards. Facing stiff competition, the KGM solution was chosen because of its seamless execution of most the most recent Umbraco Cloud features within a composable digital experience platform setting. The Umbraco team see this type of use case occurring more often in the wider digital landscape as large brands strive for a seamless experience for customers within a flexible integrated platform.

The Umbraco award win was the culmination of many months of hard work across all teams at Visarc. The recognition is appreciated and a happy biproduct of our focus on delivering a customer-focused platform that will serve KGM well as the brand enters the next phase in its development and business growth