Your Ford Ambassador

Start with the journey

Before designing anything, the team consolidated everything we knew about EV ownership, from first awareness through shopping, reserving, waiting, delivery, early use and service, for both Mach-E and Lightning owners. A few pain points kept showing up. The learning curve was huge. The wait between reservation and delivery was a black box. Dealers were inconsistent, and home charging was confusing.

Lightning owners wanted to know whether towing would kill their range. Mach-E owners wondered whether an electric Mustang is still a Mustang. The theme that tied it all together: contextualize everything for the customer.

Looking outward

We interviewed dealerships to understand what was actually happening on the showroom floor and at delivery. We also evaluated three best-in-class support experiences: Rivian, VW and Apple Support. The best ones felt less like a help desk and more like a knowledgeable friend who reaches out before you have to ask.

Meet them where they are

That led to one of our biggest decisions: no new app. Customers already live in their text messages, so the Ambassador would too. Signing up took a first name and a phone number, and a real person would text you within 48 hours.

The right moment

Timing turned out to be as important as content. Rather than giving a new owner everything at once, we mapped each conversation to a moment in the order-to-delivery journey, so customers got the right information when they actually needed it.

Prototype, test, repeat

We ran three rounds of prototype testing with EV owners and EV intenders. The prototypes weren't clickable screens. They were real text conversations sent to participants' own phones, so we could see how people reacted to a message from their Ambassador in the middle of their day.

One conversation became the core of the experience: home charging. Participants told us which outlet they had, saw how long a full charge would take, and could buy a Ford Connected Charge Station and book an installer, all without leaving the thread.

What we heard

Three themes came up again and again in prototype testing.

A voice with principles

A human service only works if every agent sounds like the same thoughtful person. We wrote principles, a style guide and a toolkit for the Ambassador team.

Designing the backstage

The friendly text thread was the part customers could see. Behind it sat order systems, a consent database, a CRM, email services and a team of agents. To make it work I built a service blueprint for the full order-to-first-charge journey, showing what the customer sees, what triggers each conversation, what the agent does, and where things break.

The blueprint was candid about the pain. Agents created case notes by hand, checked delivery status manually and had no single source of truth for where a vehicle was. Customers could only get answers during business hours and weren't always sure whether they were talking to a person or a bot. Those pain points became the roadmap.

Pilot first, then scale

We partnered with Percepta to stand up a dedicated Ambassador customer care team, and wrote a pilot delivery plan that brought Experience Design, Operations and Development together to launch a small-scale version of the program. The pilot invited Mach-E and Lightning customers in eight states as soon as their vehicle was assigned a build week.

We deliberately started manually. Order data was pulled by hand, cases were created by a supervisor and every conversation was tracked in case notes. Once the experience was proven, we automated it one step at a time: order data flowing in automatically, then automatic case creation, then every follow-up conversation triggered by the customer's progress.

What it became

Later iterations moved the Ambassador into a branded Ford messaging thread and leaned into the big moments: a celebration when your Mach-E rolls off the line, live delivery tracking, and your dealer's address when it's ready for pickup.

Key learnings