Brown Bear Website

Improving customer experience with centralized account management

The Challenge

Car Wash Enterprises, Inc., the owners of Brown Bear Car Wash, a well-known Pacific Northwest company, was looking to improve its customer experience. The company operates over 60 locations in the Puget Sound region and offers Unlimited Wash Club memberships, wash books, and branded merchandise. Their website was dated and needed updates to information architecture and visual design. Additionally, the website, CRM, and wash club enrollment systems operated entirely independently. The company wanted to modernize its platform to offer customer-facing account management features to improve customer engagement and customer service.

The Outcome

BrownBear.com is a modern, responsive web app optimized to work across devices. The site runs on a custom API and gateway service, which communicates with Brown Bear’s CRM system. The web app, Wash Club enrollment app, and CRM are fully integrated, which powers the features offered through a customer-facing account area, Brown Bear Digital. Customers can view order history, current and past club memberships, update membership levels, home car wash, and assigned vehicles. Customers can perform many actions that used to require a phone call or stopping into the wash. This update has improved customer service overall.

Our updated website changed the way that we do business. Customers have access to information they never had before, and we can leverage account management features to improve our customer service. There are more ways to buy and gift our products. This update is a huge improvement for us. – CFO & Marketing Director, Car Wash Enterprises, Inc.

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Our Approach

Car Wash Enterprises engaged Flower Press Creative Studio to design and build a new web app. We met with senior leadership, data entry staff, regional managers, and car wash attendants to learn about pain points and desired features. We started by looking at information architecture to improve the overall experience. Using workflows, we re-organized Unlimited Wash Club pages to focus on pricing based on wash level and membership term. We added subcategories to the store for more straightforward navigation and planned a logged in checkout experience to reduce redundant data entry. Brown Bear does tremendous work in the community and offers valuable flexible employment for high school students, parents, and military members. We expanded its community commitment section and included additional information about the company’s history and environmental commitment. We created wireframes and a prototype and conducted extensive stakeholder reviews and end-user testing. With feedback in mind, we finalized the design direction and started the build. Initial updates to the web app were pushed out to internal beta testers. We went through several rounds of testing and integrated feedback into the final build.

Ongoing Growth

BrownBear.com offers integrated account features to improve the overall customer experience. As Brown Bear continues to grow, the offerings available through the customer-facing account area, Brown Bear Digital will continue to expand. We expect to see great things from Brown Bear’s digital tools as they set a standard for retail businesses across the country. BrownBear.com is part of an integrated system. Learn more on the Brown Bear Wash Club App project page.