BUYING CARS AND YOUR CREDIT SCORE

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Hard pull vs soft pull. What is the difference? For buyers, a pretty large consideration and one that affects your credit score. Imagine shopping for a car. You've been to 7 dealerships trying to find the best price and the right payment. Your phone lights up with ping that your credit score isn't 800 any longer, it is now 600. Dealerships are better at doing a non credit look into your finances now, but when we were working on this, it was a new concept.

What Problems was there to solve for the user?

The current state of getting the credit scores in Dealertrack was to do a hard pull. Typically, getting someone's ID is one of the first things that happens when a customer sets foot in a dealership, especially if that person wants to do a test drive. As anyone who has looked at their credit score knows, hard pulls go against your credit and after a few visits to dealers you could find your credit score plummet.

Consumers are becoming more aware of their credit, maybe in part to commercials like Credit Karma and such. The main Credit Score companies like Experian are suggesting that when possible they should be asking for what is called a soft pull. A soft pull is similar to a hard pull, but it doesn't provide as much information, thus can be done without that hit to your score.

A soft pull could also be done even sooner. The hard pull typically happens once a consumer sits down with the dealer, but the soft pull could be done while they are on the test drive, or as soon as they give the dealer their name and address. The main benefit besides to the consumer, is the dealer doesn't have to get a social security number. That is often a barrier to getting the sale.

How it was solved solved

I had been working through an idea about a mobile app for a while. As an old web and mobile designer I think in terms of mobile as what does the dealer need in their pocket? If they are on the lot, what information can help them take care of their customers and help them make the sale? I looked around at the other 22 business units that make up Cox Automotive and there were several products where we could use their API's to help make something they'd love.

We also had to start somewhere, which was taking the single entry form and making it more like what the dealers wanted. Something they didn't have to scroll and could just use the tab key to easily fill out.

Since we are talking about soft pulls, I'll start there. Vin Solutions already had a solution around soft pulls and had done a lot of research. So, I knew we were going to start with the desktop version, so I did my own research, our user researcher also did some research and we did a survey to get things going.

During my research, I realized this was a Compliance issue still, just like a hard pull. My initial reaction was to build something that was almost a stand alone where the sales person could use it. I quickly realized while they often take and take a photo of the ID, the Sales Manager would be the one to actually run either a soft or hard pull. They wouldn't put any potential personal data into the sales person's hand for security reasons. Which then makes this more on the desktop side than mobile.

Not that there wasn't a mobile component, but it meant I had to solve for the desktop first, which isn't typical. This was still very much in flux for the design.

Next was how to solve for both a hard pull and a soft pull in the application. My first inclination was still to put it in a different place in the application, but since it was still subject to the same Compliance rules as a hard pull, I settled putting it in as a tab besides the hard pull. Yes, the naming seems weird, but I assure you, the phrasing is well known to the industry and yes we did user interviews to make sure that was the case.

I started the initial designs and then handed them off to my Senior Architect. They aren't that far from my initial work, but he then added more work into what the report would look like, and how to add other applicants, which was a much larger problem to solve for hard pulls.

How we measured success

Once the designs were done, we did another round of usability testing. No one had any issues with understanding the difference between hard and soft, and that if the consumer was to go forward with the purchase, they'd have to have a hard pull done. This is on the dealer to communicate, but we had to be clear not to show too much info so they'd think they could use that score. The banks would not take it and they run their own hard pull anyway.

I don't believe this has been implemented at that time, but the UX team is working through the mobile version now so it will be ready when needed. (It was implemented and between the screen recording tool and other analytics we could see that it didn't trip up anyone and the dealers were using it more after COVID)