From hand-offs to shared understanding
Reframing the Australian car-buying experience through customer identity and systems thinking.
Over the past decade, the Australian automotive market has undergone significant change. Today’s consumers are well-informed, sceptical, and quick to compare options. They research, check prices, read reviews, and ask for advice before ever visiting a dealership or making an online inquiry. However, many automotive companies still treat the sale as starting only when a customer shows interest, not when they first become curious.
This case study examines the current-state consumer journey within Ford Australia, not as a critique of execution or individuals, but as a system shaped by legacy structures, regulatory realities and deeply embedded operating models. The aim is to understand how the sales funnel functions today, why certain frictions persist, and what becomes possible if the experience is re-designed as a connected system rather than a sequence of hand-offs.
The main issue is not a lack of digital tools or ambition. Ford, like other global carmakers, has invested heavily in technology and dealer tools. The real challenge is making everything work together smoothly—connecting insight, trust, decisions, and ownership across different parts of the company that were not built to feel seamless for customers.
Organisational constraints and realities
Before talking about possible changes, it’s important to understand what limits the current experience. Most problems in automotive retail stem from the system's structure, not from design mistakes.
Ford Australia works in a mixed system. Brand, product, and national marketing are managed centrally, but sales, pricing, and customer relationships are handled by independent dealerships. This setup helps with scale and reach, but it also creates visible gaps for customers.
Several realities shape the current funnel:
Dealer autonomy and margin protection mean that pricing, incentives, and lead follow-up behaviours vary materially across locations, even when customers expect national consistency.
Legacy technology stacks within dealerships often prioritise stock management and compliance over experience continuity, making it difficult to create a single, persistent view of the customer.
Regulatory and compliance requirements around finance, warranties, privacy and advertising restrict how fluidly data can be shared or experiences personalised.
Product and supply constraints, particularly post-COVID, have shifted focus toward inventory allocation and lead triage rather than relationship-building.
Internal KPIs still heavily weight conversion and throughput, which can unintentionally reward short-term optimisation at the expense of long-term trust.
These challenges are not unique to Ford, and they are not easy to fix. For customers, though, they show up as inconsistency, lack of clarity, and extra effort—especially when moving from online research to visiting a dealership.
Current-state customer experience: what customers are actually saying
To ground this analysis, qualitative sentiment was synthesised from publicly available consumer discussions and reviews across Reddit, Trustpilot, Product Review and Carsales Business. While not statistically representative in isolation, these channels are valuable because they surface unfiltered emotional responses at moments of friction or delight.
Recurring themes in customer feedback
Across hundreds of threads and reviews, several patterns appear repeatedly:
Customers appreciate Ford’s product strength, particularly in utes, SUVs and performance vehicles, but describe the buying process as cognitively and emotionally draining.
People find online configurators and listings inspiring, but they often lack clear information about what’s actually available, how long delivery will take, and the total cost of owning the car.
When customers submit their details, follow-up is often slow, inconsistent, or too focused on making a sale rather than offering helpful advice that matches what the customer wants.
Customers say they have to repeat the same information several times as they move between online tools, dealerships, and finance discussions.
Trust is fragile; many customers describe entering dealerships defensively, expecting negotiation rather than collaboration.
Quantitatively, Trustpilot scores for automotive retail experiences in Australia tend to cluster between 2.5 and 3.5 out of 5, with negative reviews disproportionately focused on communication breakdowns rather than product dissatisfaction. Carsales forums similarly show that while buyers value access to inventory and pricing tools, they still feel responsible for “managing the process themselves.”
These points show that the problem is not a lack of channels or information, but the missing connection that ties the whole experience together and keeps context moving forward.
The current sales funnel as a system
From a systems perspective, the existing funnel can be summarised as a sequence of loosely connected stages:
Discovery and inspiration, driven by national marketing, search, social and third-party marketplaces.
Consideration, where customers self-educate using configurators, reviews and peer forums.
Intent signalling, typically via lead forms, test-drive bookings, or dealer contact.
Dealer-led engagement, including negotiation, finance discussion and vehicle allocation.
Purchase and handover, followed by servicing, warranty and ownership communications.
Each stage works well on its own, but there’s little connection between them. Companies often guess what customers want instead of asking directly, and information gets lost as it moves through the process. This makes sense inside the company, since different teams handle each stage, but for customers, the experience feels disconnected.
Approach and principles
This approach does not start with tools or features. Instead, it begins with guiding principles based on systems thinking and how people behave.
First, treat the purchase not as a transaction but as the formation of a long-term relationship, where trust accumulation matters more than immediate conversion.
Second, assume customers are rational but emotionally loaded, particularly when making high-value decisions under uncertainty.
Third, design for organisational reality, acknowledging that dealer networks, compliance and legacy systems will not disappear overnight.
Finally, focus on clarity and consistency instead of new features. Most problems come from missing context, not missing tools.
This way of thinking changes the question from “how do we sell cars more efficiently” to “how do we make things easier and less stressful for customers throughout their ownership journey.”
Future-state experience: a connected journey
In the future, the sales process will be less linear and more flexible. Customers will still start online, but their needs and interests will become clearer over time. When someone books a test drive, the dealer will get more than just a lead. They will receive a story about what matters to the customer, what choices they are considering, and where they still have questions.
A simplified service design blueprint illustrates this shift:
Frontstage experience becomes calmer and more consultative, with fewer repetitive questions and clearer expectations.
Backstage systems coordinate quietly, ensuring inventory, finance and follow-up are aligned to the customer’s actual readiness.
Support processes focus on continuity post-purchase, reinforcing that the relationship did not end at handover.
Emerging experience opportunities
Once a connected foundation exists, several experience opportunities become viable without over-engineering the system:
Adaptive digital guidance, where configurators evolve based on uncertainty signals rather than pushing customers to completion prematurely.
Transparent availability and delivery forecasting, reducing anxiety and speculation during supply-constrained periods.
Context-aware dealer interactions, enabling sales staff to act as guides rather than information gatherers.
Ownership-phase experiences, such as proactive service education and lifecycle communications, that reinforce trust long after purchase.
Importantly, these ideas are not distant dreams. They are small steps forward made possible by better teamwork, not by changing everything at once.
Outcomes and impact
While this analysis is speculative rather than implemented, comparable transformations in adjacent industries suggest several plausible impacts:
Reduced lead attrition, as customers feel understood earlier and disengage less defensively.
Higher trust and satisfaction scores, driven by consistency and reduced effort.
Improved dealer efficiency, as conversations begin at a more informed starting point.
Stronger lifetime value, as ownership experience reinforces brand affinity beyond the initial sale.
The most important result is emotional. Customers move from feeling defensive during negotiations to working together with staff to make decisions.
Learnings and trade-offs
No system redesign is without compromise. Introducing a CDP requires careful governance to avoid data misuse or over-personalisation. Dealers must be involved early to ensure the platform is seen as an enabler rather than a surveillance tool. There is also a risk of over-engineering experiences in pursuit of seamlessness, which can paradoxically reduce authenticity.
The main lesson is to show restraint. The goal is not perfection, but to make everything work well together.
Transferable insights
Several insights from this case extend beyond automotive:
Experience quality is often limited more by organisational structure than by customer-facing design.
Trust is built through continuity, not persuasion.
Data becomes valuable only when it reduces human effort, rather than replacing human judgement.
Systems thinking allows incremental change to compound over time.
The future of car retail in Australia will not be defined by one platform, channel, or innovation. It will depend on how well companies align their internal systems with their customers' real experiences. For Ford Australia, the opportunity is not to reinvent the car-buying process, but to connect what already exists so customers feel guided, not managed.
This is more of a leadership challenge than a design problem. It requires patience, teamwork across departments, and a new way of seeing experience as part of the company’s foundation. When this change happens, the sales funnel becomes more than just a funnel. It turns into a stronger system built on clarity, trust, and shared understanding.