Situation
When making a decision about adding equipment to their fleet, Cat customers have a variety of options from purchasing, leasing to financing. To assist customers, Caterpillar Finance needed to create several easy-to-use self-service calculator tools that allow customers to run the numbers.
Goals
- Improve customer experience and make the financing process/experience less intimidating
- Increase engagement and enable interactions
- Increase lead generation, offering up request a quote options where it makes sense.
Requirements
- The tools would be placed in multiple Caterpillar experiences. On one hand, they had to live on Caterpillar Finance pages, but they would also be embedded into product pages on Cat.com.
- The tools needed to work across all Caterpillar Finance websites, so the scope included 24 websites, 13 languages, and more than 7 currencies.
- The content and calculations within the tool needed to be directly managed by Cat Finance professionals. Often times, changes could not wait for a product release. We decided to build these tools as a component within Adobe Experience Manager, our CMS.
- The tools needed to be integrated into Eloqua, our marketing automation platform. Most immediately, this was to allow users to express interest in taking the next step. Long-term, the purpose was to capture data that could be used to build intelligence.
- A significant portion of Caterpillar Financial users leveraged mobile devices. We needed the mobile experience to equal that of desktop. Because of the tools complexity, we had to create a mobile version of each.
Actions
For this project:
- I helped Caterpillar Finance create Affordability and Payment Calculators which helped customers research different payment options and make sound decisions.
- I reused the design elements to start a forms design library that could be repurposed in future projects.
Results
This tool was launched in 2018 and continues to live on Caterpillar experiences today:
- Live reference: Payment Calculator
- Live reference: Affordability Calculator
