Lexus Encore: A Personalised Experience

Providing the ultimate ownership experience

Lexus Australia has a very clear goal: to become a global luxury lifestyle brand.

IE was engaged by Lexus to explore and execute a new digital experience for Lexus Australia’s owners. This new digital product will ultimately help achieve Lexus’s vision of becoming a leader in making luxury personal.

The why

The Australian luxury car market has become increasingly competitive over the last decade. Simply having an incredible vehicle and a subsequent owner benefits program is no longer enough to stand out from the competition. The objectives of this project were to:

Provide greater convenience for Lexus owners, who want seamless, luxury experiences and hassle-free motoring.
Deliver a personalised app centred around owner benefits and mobility solutions.
Further differentiate themselves from other luxury car competitors.
Provide a new digital touchpoint and richer customer insights for Lexus and its dealership network.
Increase customer loyalty, retention, and engagement through delivering an app that lets customers experience amazing.

There were several technical challenges our engineers faced throughout the project. These include the following:

Create a seamless integration between the ownership app and the registration as a service offering from Gigya to ensure guests have complete trust in the authentication process (and never have to leave the Lexus experience).
Establish microservices patterns utilising .NET core deployed to Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) - later VMware Tanzu.
Build a custom integration to a third-party provider for On Demand management of vehicles. Ensure integration was seamless and the guest could achieve everything from within the Lexus ownership app.
Enable component sharing between the main Lexus website and the new Ownership App to avoid duplication.\

At the outset, we conducted interviews with business and customer stakeholders to understand needs, wants, and pain points to learn what makes a true luxury experience. Through a series of customer interviews, we sought to better understand Lexus’s audience. Customers validated the concept to create a ‘digital passport’ - a product that acts as a single touchpoint for all interactions with a focus on personalisation and anticipation. Hence, the challenge was to create a personalised digital experience for the right guests at the right time.

These insights, opportunities, and learnings helped form a subsequent product roadmap and a working prototype. A customer-centric journey map was co-designed with initial concepts alongside the Lexus team which were prototyped and tested with customers. This helped validate ideas and findings around personalisation and anticipated features.

Engineering approach

To achieve the technical vision of this project, there was a tight collaboration among several TMCA and third-party teams. Existing services had to be augmented to support Lexus and new integrations had to be created. The work was sequenced to ensure external services were ready when the app was ready to integrate.

Two separate teams ran concurrently to build the web and native experience of the app as well as the common services that drive the features of the app. Extensive testing was performed throughout the development cycle and was automated whenever possible.

During the engagement, several platform selection processes were conducted to identify the right third-party platform that could deliver the experience Lexus wanted.

The team started by designing the technical architecture that would be required to deliver both a web and mobile native experience for the Lexus guests. The high-level technical architecture included:

A single-page web application written in React and TypeScript
A native application for iPhone and Android written in Xamarin
Many shared microservice APIs written in .NET Core and deployed to PCF (later VMware Tanzu)
A new shared style guide for Lexus

The ownership build for Lexus involved several brand new integrations and architecture patterns that had to be established. Some of these were:

Integration with the Gigya registration as a service (RaaS) offering: We had to overcome a number of technical challenges to get this integrated both for web and native experiences and also challenges related to ensuring the user experience felt native to the guest regardless of the platform.
Establish a microservices pattern using .NET Core and PCF to handle all the integrations that were required.

To ensure a consistent user experience for Lexus guests as they move between the ownership app and the main website, a shared style guide was established. This enabled both consistency and speed of development as we could reuse components in both streams of work.

The final culmination of this project was the creation of a first-in-class mobile application providing the ultimate ownership experience. Flagship features of the app include:

‘On demand’ which gives customers short-term loan access to Lexus vehicles via major Australian airports and many Lexus dealerships.
‘Valet parking’ at major shopping centres across Australia, to cut down on wasted time looking for a parking space.
‘Rewards’ which include exclusive hotel access and fuel discounts.