How speaking to customers turned a hidden feature into a revenue driver

The problem

When I was Head of Brand at an automotive D2C car leasing brand, we had a maintenance product that customers could add at checkout. Attachment rates were sitting at 8% and nobody could work out why customers weren’t snapping our hands off because it was such a good deal.

The assumption internally was that people just didn't want it. That it was a price sensitivity issue, or that maintenance simply wasn't a priority for our customers.

I didn't buy it. So I brought in a research agency, sat in on the interviews, and listened to what customers actually said.

What we heard

What we heard was the opposite of indifference. Customers loved the product — the servicing, the glass repair, the VIP treatment at Kwikfit where they didn't need to bring any paperwork. They thought it was brilliant. They just had absolutely no idea it existed, because we'd buried it in checkout copy that described it in automotive industry language rather than in terms of what it actually did for them.

The product wasn't the problem. The way we communicated it was.

What changed

I took the findings back to the business, made the case for prioritising the changes, and worked with the team to rewrite the product description and move the key features (the ones customers had told us they loved) to the front. We spoke their language instead of ours.

Attachment rates went from 8% to 14%.

That's the thing about customer insight. Sometimes it doesn't tell you to change the product. It tells you to change how you talk about it. And sometimes that's worth more.