Interview with Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith
by peterme
A couple weeks ago, I spoke with car-sharing service Zipcar’s CEO Scott Griffith. Scott is presenting at UX Week 2008 in August. You can listen to our conversation (40 minute MP3), or read excerpts.
Zipcar is definitely a services firm whose star is ascending, and a key element to their success is the experience design of their service. It’s right there in their mission statement: “Our user experience strives to elegantly combine the promise of the Internet with wireless communication and online communities.”
What most interested me in talking to Scott was how a CEO considers user experience in relationship to other concerns. Scott mentions that Zipcar is the first services firm that he’s aware of that follows kaizen engineering principles, which were originally developed to ensure quality management and continuous improvement for Toyota in their car manufacturing. We also discussed the balance between user experience and his primary business metric, utilization, and the importance of cars not being utilized more than 40% of the time, or it would upset customers, who wouldn’t be able to find a car.
I’d also love to *see* the customer lifecycle diagram that he talks about, where they’ve mapped a customer’s entire experience with Zipcar, from awareness of the service, through joining, to leaving (which, on average, happens at about 5 years).
I hope you enjoy listening to our conversation as much as I had having it, and please use the comments section here for any further thoughts or ideas you’d like to see Scott raise at UX Week 2008. (And register using the promotional code BLOG to get 10% off!)
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on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 6:32 pm and is filed under Experience design, Experience strategy, Management, Service Design, Upcoming Events.
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January 24th, 2008 at 2:41 am
Since zipcar had the genius idea to remove ALL available cars that are not on 6 different college campuses in all of Southern California, they are probably going to see a mass exodus of pissed off customers from Southern California on said diagram and do nothing about it except put on a fake smile and refund fees. What good does such a diagram do.
The zipcar/flexcar merger was a huge mistake for this area. Since it was hard enough finding a car with reasonable public transportation to and from the car, I don’t think many people seemed to be thrilled with the idea of Flexcar, and to me the idea of a small customer base would be entirely plausible from that standpoint. After all, that was the biggest reason why I (and, well, pretty much most of the people I know who were interested) didn’t sign up even though I loved flexcar up in san francisco - every time I looked at cars on their website it usually required something like a 5 mile trek to the car. And well, this is Los Angeles. Home to really awful public transit.
So their idea of servicing southern california is removing something like half the already tiny fleet of available cars and then only making their services available from campuses where there’s usually halfway decent public transit available. Wonder why campus cars stay, are they that profitable? Maybe because of the convenience of the location to students and faculty..that isn’t present anywhere else…hence nobody else really using it..
Complete genius.