Case study: EV / Automotive

- HQ: Gothenburg, Sweden

- 3,000 employees

Polestar is a Swedish EV brand focused on creating high-performance electric cars with a strong emphasis on sustainability, technology, and design. While it was originally launched as a performance brand by Volvo Cars, today it’s scaling into 27 markets across the globe. 

This scale required a shift in which customer experience is not confined into a single siloed team, but instead available for everyone from Insight Leads, Journey Managers and Strategy & Operations.

As Fredrik Sterner Cederlöf, Head of Customer Insights & Analytics, CX at Polestar, puts it: “Within this first project, for the team, TheyDo became our single point of truth and a solid repository for what to prioritize and why”.

With TheyDo, Polestar was able to align around a shared understanding of the customer by putting everything in the context of the customer journey in a way everyone can understand.

Building the Journey Framework

Even though Polestar had a pretty good understanding of the customer experience; it just wasn't visualized in an easy nor accessible way. “You had to engage with numerous individuals to obtain a comprehensive understanding of a customer's journey”, Fredrik shared. "So it was quite time-consuming to gather the knowledge needed to have a single view of the customer and their interaction with our brand”. 

To get started, Polestar established a transformation team from across functions including CX, digital and business operations to tackle the problem. 

quote

Within this first project, for the team, TheyDo became our single point of truth and a solid repository for what to prioritize and why.

Fredrik Sterner Cederlöf

Head of Customer Insights & Analytics, CX

TheyDo’s ability to put journeys in a framework helped Polestar to view journeys in a holistic way, while also being able to zoom in on the details. They identified key moments in the customer journey and selected a specific phase to implement a more customer-centric approach. This included assessing existing ideas, supported by customer insights from both qualitative and quantitative studies, and visualizing customer journeys using TheyDo.

In general, TheyDo helps align the Polestar team around a shared understanding. Fredrik says, “In a way I feel like we democratized the customer insights that we have at the company. Plus, people come and go, so we need to make sure that everything we know is in a centralized insight repository.”

Laying the foundation for Journey Management

This process of bringing all journeys together in a unified framework provided a clear picture of experience gaps and its effect on the business. On a structural level, taking a Journey Management approach has challenged the way Polestar thinks about roles, allowing them to think more clearly about who is responsible for each part of the process. Their long term ambition is to organize into channel-agnostic teams, with defined roles such as Insight Leads, Journey Manager, Strategy & Operations for enhancing business and experience. As Fredrik puts it, “I think it just becomes quite natural when you start building these journeys that you need to have someone being that conductor in this great orchestra in an organization like this, holding everything together”.

Visualizing the customer experience also helps them to better align around opportunities for improvement. Fredrik elaborates on this: “We can now easily place OKRs in a specific journey, assess areas for improvement, and then develop strategies to achieve those goals. This allows for more meaningful discussions that everyone can comprehend”.

Polestar has started to see changes in how they talk about results, with dialogue framed around outcomes and what they need to achieve rather than outputs and suggested solutions.

Becoming the brand for customer-centric excellence

Overall, working across customer journeys has promoted cross-functional collaboration and effective communication. By enabling collaboration across departments, TheyDo is helping different functions at Polestar to find and solve problems together instead of in isolation. As Fredrik shares: “By aligning and collaborating across our organization, irrespective of internal structures, we can effectively organize around the customer journey. This empowers teams to make informed decisions that deliver value for customers and the business, while staying true to our brand strategy”.

For Polestar, it’s not just about the customer journeys. It’s about building a management system where everyone agrees on the opportunities, to make a sustainable future possible in an ethical way. With TheyDo, they are redefining how their teams can tackle the most ambitious business challenges in harmony with their customer needs.