Driving an 86% Jump in Dealer Satisfaction
TL;DR - After I designed a complete 0 → 1 dashboard, dealers had data but no fast way to turn it into decisions. I led the design of a context-aware AI that lets users speak or type a prompt and instantly get analysis, charts, and PDF reports.
The Context
My Role
Senior Product Designer
Team
Founder, CTO, 3rd party dev team, QA
Space
Redacted, SaaS, Automotive, AI
What I walked into
Dealers couldn’t pull historical data fast
One-off feature requests were eating up time and attention
The DMS was central to daily work, but individual insights where manual tasks
Space on screen was already tight, new features had to fit without being in the way
The Problem
Dealers needed a way to create reliable insights and reports in seconds, without manual searching, analysts or extra tools.
Aging stock ties up capital; late insights mean missed pricing moves; manual reporting steals hours from sales. If we can compress “question → actionable answer” to seconds, we improve margin, turnover, and confidence in our users.
The Discovery
My starting point
Interviewed 6 dealerships (owners, sales managers, finance admins, technicians)
Mapped current reporting flows and time-to-report
Ran CSAT surveys to gauge where we currently sit with reporting
Collected screenshots of workarounds
Tested comfort levels with AI (most already used ChatGPT casually)
What I heard
"I want to see what’s sitting too long, not mess with filters."
“Every time the owner asks for a report, it’s a half-day in Excel.”
“I want to walk into a meeting with a chart ready, not raw data.”
“I don’t care about another dashboard unless it actually saves me time."
What does all this mean?
Dealers don’t want “search,” they want answers
Every output needs to link back to the source data
The key value isn’t new dashboards, it’s speed-to-report
Adoption depends on making it feel like part of their workflow, not “new tech”
My guardrails
Every output links back to its table/view
Entry point must be intuitive, simple and not frustrating
AI auto-detects context (Inventory, Finance, etc.)
Design exploration
Modal vs. Drawer
Modal won: lets dealers see data while prompting and navigate freely. Drawer took too much space and broke navigation.
Clipping issue
Original search design inputs clipped long prompts. Replaced with expandable stacked input for clarity, it also used layer blur, but in practice caused all the text to distort so switched to a box shadow.
Sidebar placement
Broke mental model, sider bar = navigation not action.
Top Bar placement
Stole space from core CTAs, repeats across every screen.
Floating input
Always there, minimal friction, fits “ask anywhere” idea, but can cause issue as it blocks lower screen data.
Final Design
Floating Input Button
Bottom-centre button styled like a text field
Glass background so it doesn’t block dashboards
Expands into full overlay on click
Text + Voice
Dealers type or record voice
Voice is transcribed to text before sending
Preview, confirm, or discard
Contextual
Links to the current dashboard/dataset automatically
Context stays active even when switching screens
Dealers can switch context to different datasets
Conversation
Full chat history
Start new or pick up recent conversations
Minimise panel to keep working while AI processes
Little space as dealers required quick, short answers in text form, so graphs, charts and deep insights are sent as a downloadable link. (also saves on generation tokens)
More Menu
Mark chats as private or team-shared
Access complete history
Switch between models (own API key or managed plan)
Settings is accessed in account area
The Impact
Dealer satisfaction nearly doubled, from 38% to 71% (86% increase CSAT Scores)
Reporting became part of the meeting, not prep work before it
Teams started basing decisions on data instead of instinct
Dealers told us the DMS “felt complete” with insights built in
Learnings
Dealers didn’t care about “AI features.” They cared about speed, clarity, and trust. By placing this inside their daily flow and keeping outputs transparent, we built something dealers used every day, and something they could actually rely on.