SHARE NOW is Europe's largest car-sharing company, which offers services in 16 cities, across eight countries. The company is a merger of two pioneering car-sharing providers: car2go, owned by Daimler and DriveNow, owned by BMW and Sixt. Currently, SHARE NOW has 3 million users and a fleet of 11,000 vehicles.
Thoughtworks joined forces with SHARE NOW in 2019, at a time of big change; five months before the public brand merge of car2go and DriveNow. We supported this merger in three areas: building and launching their new website for a better customer experience; integrating and modernizing their core systems; and building up an internal software delivery department.
With our work we achieved the following outcomes:
Brought the core systems in-house fast to react quickly to market changes
Improved feedback for customer service
Increased efficiency in the customer service department
Quickened the deployment frequency for the micro frontend architecture
The goal
SHARE NOW’s goal was launching a new website and offering customers a user-friendly journey into the SHARE NOW world. This turned out to be a challenge, as it required an upgrade of systems and tech stack. Thoughtworks supported the team with additional capacity and scope management to deliver a great customer experience in time for the planned launch date.
Gaining more control over the critical systems processing their customer data, was another goal from ShareNow These core systems had been serving car2go well for ten years, but extending them was becoming a bottleneck. Thoughtworks assisted a smooth and stable takeover of these systems, bringing them onto SHARE NOW’s platform. We also helped build and upskill two new teams, managing and monitoring knowledge transfer, and working on architectural changes and modernizations necessary for the new organizational setup.
What’s next? Speed and innovation is key to delight customers
While the merger was SHARE NOW’s immediate priority, the company also needed to focus on other operational upgrades to achieve their business goals.
SHARE NOW's operations were run off a single monolithic application. It had become hard to maintain and while many teams needed to make changes there was no clear ownership. The user experience was suffering as small changes quickly became unmanageable and new feature development had ground to a halt.
SHARE NOW had streamlined the system by pulling out capabilities that could standalone. But the time had come to take out a core part of the application that crossed many capabilities – finding and managing customers. The Thoughtworks teams helped to align the technical drivers with measurable business problems within customer service, and used a user-centric approach to define a valuable slice of the product to deliver.
The team simplified the search process by highlighting key customer details that were likely to identify the customer's reason for contact. Within six months a new customer overview tool was rolled out to all first level customer support.
Thoughtworks helped us build a modern software development and enabled us to react quickly to the ever changing mobility market.
In addition to building a tool that helped customer service, the Thoughtworks team laid the foundation of a micro frontend architecture. This simplified the integration, sped up the application and enabled fast implementation of user centric features by the teams with the most domain knowledge.
Thoughtworks led the creation of a design system for SHARE NOW business applications, which made the seamless user experience possible. The design system was adopted by three teams within the first three months, with an active inner-sourced community contributing and growing the system over the first year.
Our work resulted in increased positive feedback for customer service. The new implemented customer overview and a user centric approach made the work of the customer service department much more efficient. Moreover, we drastically increased the deployment frequency with the micro frontend architecture.
