top of page
Honda Motorcycle - DMS
Transforming Honda’s Motorcycle Lead Management Platform
ROLE
UX UI Designer | Researcher
Team
Cross-functional team including:
-
UX UI Designer & Research (Myself)
-
Business Analyst
-
Salesforce Developers
-
Dealer Network
TIMELINE
4 Months
Year
2025
Project Overview
Improving Honda’s Dealer Lead Management System Expereince
Honda’s motorcycle division manages thousands of customer enquiries through its digital channels and dealership network. These enquiries are captured through Honda’s website and routed through salesforce to the dealer portal where sales teams manage follow-ups and conversions.
However, the existing lead management platform had evolved over time without a clear user experience strategy. As a result, dealership teams struggled to manage leads efficiently, follow-up with customers, and track sales outcomes.
This project focused on analysing the current lead management ecosystem and designing a more efficient future-state system that improves dealer network web flow, lead visibility, and conversion performance.
The outcome of the project was a reimagined dealer portal experience supported by improved lead qualification, automation, and workflow visibility.
My Role
My responsibilities included:
• Analysing current business processes and system architecture
• Identifying usability and operational gaps in the lead management system
• Mapping end-to-end lead journeys across multiple systems
• Designing improved workflows for lead handling and prioritisation
• Defining the user experience for the redesigned dealer portal
• Creating interface concepts and prototypes for testing with dealership users
Understanding the Ecosystem
The Honda lead management ecosystem spans several systems that work together to capture, process, and distribute customer enquiries.
The process begins when a customer submits an enquiry on the Honda motorcycles website. The website is built on Sitecore and allows customers to request quotes, test rides, or download brochures.
These enquiries are then transferred through Dealer Net integration into Salesforce, which stores the lead information and routes the enquiry to the appropriate dealership.
Dealership teams access these leads through a portal built on Salesforce Experience Cloud, where sales consultants accept leads, contact customers, and update sales outcomes.
Behind the scenes, several supporting systems are also involved, including SAP for product and stock data, Marketing Cloud for communications, and InMoment for customer surveys.
Because these systems operate independently, the lead management workflow often becomes fragmented and difficult for dealers to manage effectively.
Key Stakeholders
The lead management process involves multiple teams across the organisation.
-
Marketing teams manage the website forms and digital campaigns that generate leads.
-
Sales operations teams monitor the performance of dealerships and track conversion metrics.
-
Dealership teams — including dealer principals, sales managers, and consultants — are responsible for managing customer enquiries and converting leads into sales.
-
IT and integration teams maintain the technical systems that support data flow across the platform.
-
Customers ultimately interact with the system when submitting enquiries or engaging with dealerships during the buying process.
Current Lead Journey
The current lead lifecycle follows a series of steps across multiple systems.
-
A customer submits an enquiry through the Honda website. The enquiry is transferred via the Dealer Net integration into Salesforce where a lead record is created.
-
The lead is then placed into a dealership queue within the dealer portal. A sales consultant must manually accept the lead before beginning the follow-up process.
-
Once accepted, the consultant contacts the customer and records notes about the interaction. The lead status can then be updated to either sold or lost depending on the outcome of the enquiry.
-
While this workflow appears straightforward, several usability and operational challenges were discovered during the analysis phase.
Lead Journey process flow
Key Problems Identified
The current lead management system contains several structural limitations that impact both dealer productivity and customer experience.
-
Many processes rely heavily on manual updates, which leads to inconsistent data and delays in customer follow-ups.
-
Leads are routed into dealership queues without automation, requiring consultants to manually accept and process each enquiry.
-
The system also lacks mechanisms for identifying duplicate leads, which often results in multiple records for the same customer enquiry.
-
Activity tracking is another major issue. Tasks and follow-ups are not consistently logged within the lead record, making it difficult to understand previous interactions with customers.
-
Additionally, the dealer portal homepage provides very little actionable information, making it difficult for consultants and managers to prioritise their work.
Operational Impact
-
These issues create several operational challenges for dealerships.
-
Sales consultants struggle to prioritise which leads require immediate attention.
-
Managers have limited visibility into the sales pipeline and cannot easily track team performance.
-
Customer enquiries are sometimes missed or delayed due to the lack of reminders or follow-up workflows.
-
Duplicate leads and incomplete data reduce the reliability of reporting and make it difficult to measure marketing performance.
-
Ultimately, these issues reduce dealer adoption of the system and negatively affect lead conversion rates.
Design Opportunities
Based on the analysis of the current system, several opportunities were identified to improve the lead management experience.
-
The system needed stronger lead validation and qualification at the point of capture.
-
Dealership teams required better tools for prioritising and managing leads.
-
The dealer portal required improved dashboards that provide clear operational insights.
-
Automation could reduce manual effort by routing leads intelligently and sending reminders for follow-ups.
-
Improving customer context within the system could help dealers understand previous interactions and personalise their approach.
Future Vision
-
The future-state lead management system focuses on creating a more intelligent and automated workflow that supports both dealerships and customers.
-
The redesigned system introduces a lead service layer that validates incoming enquiries, removes duplicates, and assigns leads to the appropriate dealerships.
-
Leads are automatically scored based on customer intent, purchase timing, ownership history, and enquiry type.
-
Dealership teams receive actionable notifications that include key lead information and direct links to the relevant lead record.
-
The new system also introduces automation for reminders, escalations
Key Features Designed
The redesigned portal introduces several new capabilities.
-
Lead scoring categorises enquiries as hot, warm, or cold based on intent signals such as finance interest, trade-in information, and purchase timeframe.
-
Customer 360 views provide dealerships with visibility into previous enquiries, ownership history, and service interactions.
-
Activity timelines automatically log calls, emails, notes, and tasks, ensuring that all customer interactions are recorded in one place.
-
Automation features include SLA timers that track response times and escalate unattended leads to managers when required.
Lead Lifecycle Redesign
The redesigned workflow introduces a clearer lead lifecycle.
New leads are validated and assigned to dealerships automatically.
Once accepted, sales consultants make first contact with the customer and record the interaction in the system.
Qualified leads are converted into opportunities where product information and pricing are synchronised with SAP.
When a sale is completed, the system automatically closes the lead based on VIN registration data.
This closed-loop system ensures that lead outcomes are captured accurately and attributed to the correct marketing campaigns
Prototype
Outcome
The redesigned lead management system improves the way dealerships manage customer enquiries and track sales activities.
By introducing automation, better dashboards, and improved lead context, the new system helps dealerships prioritise leads and respond to customers more efficiently.
The redesigned workflows also improve data quality and reporting accuracy, enabling Honda to gain better visibility into lead conversion performance across the dealer network.
Reflection
This project highlighted the complexity of designing enterprise systems that serve multiple stakeholders across a large organisation.
Working with dealership teams helped uncover real operational challenges that were not visible in the system documentation.
The experience reinforced the importance of aligning system design with real user workflows and demonstrated how thoughtful UX design can improve both operational efficiency and customer experience.
bottom of page