By understanding how users interacted with its product, Kavak streamlined its product design processes, making more data-driven and customer-centric decisions.
Kavak is the leading e-commerce dedicated to buying, selling, and financing used cars in Latin America, they have one of the largest online catalogs of guaranteed and certified cars in the region and they are the second most valuable startup in Latin America, with a valuation of US $8.7B. They have more than 40 stores in Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, their own financial service, their website, and a robust after-sales service through their app, they continue to work to offer the best products, adding value to every stage of their customers' lives with their cars.
One of the big pains for Kavak was product launches, every vertical launch on a weekly basis, and before Amplitude, the problem they had was that they couldn't assess if the product had worked or not. They made inferences based on fragmented information within the databases or small spikes in conversions they found in that time period… But the data tells a different story.
“What Amplitude has allowed us to do is from day one to have accurate and reliable information on the product”
Being able to evaluate if a product release went well or badly or if it is impacting other areas or segments and whether the consumer experience is good or not, helped to stop certain launches and keep them more controlled.
This led to an improved product design culture, and today Kavak has a much more data-driven and customer-centric mindset, designing each product based on business events, questions, and problems… and they don’t release anything until they analyze the data.
Another front they wanted to cover was marketing decision-making: they wanted to stop seeing decisions in a binary way and carry out correlational analysis, not only focused on macro conversion but also adding the analysis of micro conversions, funnel analysis, channels, temporalities, etc. Today with Amplitude they can comprehensively analyze the entire customer journey.
“Amplitude is 100% fulfilling its role.”
For Kavak, being able to solve problems in real time has saved them not only time but a lot of loss. When there was a problem on the site, for example, it could take up to two or three days to detect the error and this could mean a huge loss… And even after detecting the error, it was very difficult to identify where it was in order to assess it. Today with Amplitude they have alerts and thanks to all the events implemented in the platform, they can see much faster where the error is occurring and solve it in real time.
When they began their search for a product analytics tool, they knew that it was vital to understand how users were interacting with their product.
It was clear to them that at the beginning of any implementation process it is necessary to know the business questions that need to be answered and it was with this notion in mind, Kavak faced this new challenge.
Kavak is a product made up of many moving parts: they have products for purchase, sale, financing, trading, price comparison, etc. And a first point they sought to attack was the great inconvenience they had when analyzing user flows, because by having multiple entrances and points of contact, users could arrive through any of the products and jump to others, therefore it was very important that the tool they used allowed them to analyze these routes.
“[Amplitude] is a tool that closed the holes in the data for us”
Another vital feature they needed was the ability to create user profiles. As Kavak does not work like traditional e-commerce, as only the initial process of the funnel happens in the web or the app (appointment schedule to see a car, reviews, etc.), and the final stages are carried out face-to-face in their hubs, it was paramount that they could associate the web events with the information of the hubs stored in CRMs, databases or data warehouses, and be able to determine what events the same user had made from the different points of contact and carry out an analysis complete of the funnel.
“[Amplitude] allowed us to be able to make this union with the information that we did not have before”
“[Product Minds] was always there for us. It was invaluable to have the original control documents, such as the Activation Workbook, which saved us a lot of time and headaches.”
Today the entire company has access to data, from the Operations, Product, Marketing, Channel Leads, Heads of Acquisition teams to Data Science and Global BI, and Amplitude's power users are decision-makers within Kavak, and all the decision-makers are there on a day-to-day basis, with full access to data and dashboards.
“Product Minds was a great ally for the evangelization [of Amplitude]. It was great to have them in the training programs.”