Behind the Screen: A Sitdown With a Developer of Cat Central

Few understand what goes into developing an app from beginning to end. One important step in the process is designing a smooth customer experience (CX) for any user, no matter if you’re on your first piece of Cat® equipment or your tenth. We sat down with Ben Geyer, one of our CX project managers for our new mobile parts ordering and maintenance app – Cat Central, to understand more.

            Lucy: Start off with an introduction and how’d you get into developing at Cat?

Ben: My funny things are #1. We’ll get this out of the way: I have 8 kids, so we can get that behind us. The other thing is I’ve been here at Cat for about 26/27 years, so a long time. I started here after I graduated from Illinois State (CS Major), and I’m a 4^th generation person working at Caterpillar in my family. For a lot of my career, I was on the technical side, so really a solution architect, and getting a lot of experience on eCommerce side of things. We started this effort to grow our aftermarket and to figure out the way we can touch many more people in an efficient way, and a decision was made that we needed to have a mobile app to serve the needs of customers that are on the go.

            How’d you get involved with Cat Central specifically?

So I was on the team that started the process of building out what that app would look like. And they were looking for a manager for that, so here I am a year and a half later. It was a pretty big shift in terms of product management versus the technical side, but I can use a lot of the skills I had before from understanding the business and the technical to make sure that we’re doing things right.

            You seem like a puzzle guy, do you like puzzles?

Yeah, I do, just trying to figure out solutions that are more complex, especially like IT systems and business units and stuff like that. A big one is how do you kind of put that puzzle all together of like this is what the consumer wants vs. this is what we as a business want, and where do we meet in the middle?

            Day-to-day, what have you been working on since launch?

Continuing to iterate on that as we’ve actually developed and released the app and then bene putting additional features into it as we’ve gone along. So both user testing for concepts and testing for launching in different countries to make sure that it works from a regional perspective.

            What was it like piecing together the customer experience?

It’s difficult, because we don’t always even know necessarily who this person using is on the other side of the screen. There’s consumer research that was done and looking at user behavior of how our other digital properties were being used. We’d design and run by customers and ask if it resonated with them, and got some good feedback of some of the general terminology and things like that that we needed to adjust to make it so that people could understand what the app was trying to do. We try to portray our different offerings [within the app] so people can select if they’d like to use it or not. We try to advertise to the audiences I think should be using the app as much as possible, explaining the benefits and letting them self-select if it’s a need they have. Our offerings are really kind of tailored towards certain needs.

           How did you ensure a smooth experience for every level of Cat® customer?

We see Cat Central as kind of an entry point, some portion of customer will start using it and realize they use the fault code lookup feature a lot, and then we have that opportunity to cross promote and they could consider using SIS2GO to do their own diagnostics, not things built inside of Cat Central necessarily, but we can use the app to promote additional things they might be interested in. Self-selection again.

What was your biggest challenge you came across and how’d you handle it?

Definitely what we’ve already been talking about, which is that broad range of customers we have that all have different wants and needs and how do we serve that all. We ultimately just try to think about the customer experience so that at the end of the day we’re doing the right things for them.

What’s been your favorite part about your work?

Just how much I’ve developed in terms of skills along the way here, lots of communication presenting to different groups that are interested or stakeholders and so that’s been a skill I’ve been refining a bit more.

Download the Cat Central app today on the App Store or get it on Google Play.

*Availability may vary by dealer.