Premium Is Certainty

Not long ago a customer walked me through his experience of buying a car from us, step by step, screen by screen. At one point he asked to see the cars he had shortlisted, so we went to the floor. One of them would not start. Battery down. In front of him, in front of me.

My first reaction was embarrassment. The more useful reaction came a minute later: this is not an edge case, this is the category. A used car is a machine with a past. Batteries die, parts wear, something goes wrong that no checklist caught, and anyone who runs this business pretending otherwise is fooling himself. But watch what happened inside the customer's head. He was not calculating the cost of a battery. He was asking: if this is what I can see, what can I not see? Is the engine as honest as the listing? One dead battery had put every claim about that car on trial.

The question cuts deep because of what a car is in this country. Whatever your income, it is the second biggest purchase of your life, and it carries your family's pride and your neighbours' judgment along with your savings. I have seen it in myself. The day I bought my own car I took six people for rides, six separate rounds. The first instinct after buying a car is to put your mother in the passenger seat and drive. So the customer arrives carrying huge excitement balanced on huge nervousness, and it does not take much to tip it.

Now sit in our internal reviews and listen to what breaks. A customer sees one price and gets quoted another. A car he has paid a token for shows up as sold. A refund has left our systems but has not reached him, with no word to him in between. An RC transfer has gone quiet somewhere between us and a government office. Above all of these sits the car itself. That dead battery belongs on the list, at the top. A customer can live with a slow refund if he trusts the machine. If he doubts the machine, nothing else we fix matters. On our dashboards these are separate problems with separate owners: pricing, inventory, payments, operations. In the customer's chest they are one feeling. I do not know. I do not know if the car is good. I do not know where my money is. I do not know if the papers will come.

For a long time I struggled to give that feeling a name the whole company could organise around. The trigger came from somewhere unrelated. I was listening to David Senra interview Gustav Soderstrom, Spotify's co-CEO. He was asked why anyone should come to work at Spotify every day, and he answered with three words: time well spent. My mind just blew. On Netflix or Instagram you can argue you are wasting time. On Spotify you are running with music, waiting at an airport with a podcast. Time well spent. What hit me was not that the phrase is pretty. It is that the phrase works as a test. An engineer at Spotify can hold any feature against it and know whether it belongs. I was jealous. We had priorities on every wall and no sentence like that.

I tried to write ours many times. Everything I produced sounded like a poster in a lobby. Then, in a leadership discussion where all those broken cases were on the table at once, the labels collapsed into one word and I stopped hunting for poetry. Here it is, in plain language. In our category, the most premium experience is the one with the least uncertainty. That is why Cars24 exists. The words are ordinary. The bar is brutal. Because now you can run the test on everything we do. Does this screen leave the customer more certain or less? This call? This price? This delay?

I also have to be blunt about what premium does not mean, because every internal discussion of customer experience drifts the same way. Fancier showrooms. People receiving you in coats and jackets. A box of chocolates at delivery. In one of those meetings I finally said it bluntly: forget luxury. Emirates versus Ryanair is the wrong axis for us. Premium in our category is not splurging. Premium is that you come once and your work gets done, instead of making rounds of our hub, our call centre and a government office. A customer will forgive us a plain chair. He will not forgive a third visit for the same problem.

Think about where you happily pay extra. Moving house: if the packers arrive late, the whole plan collapses, and the kids still have to reach school. So you pay whoever you believe will actually show up. Urgent travel: a delayed flight can mean a missed interview or a missed wedding, so you pay more for the ticket that removes the doubt. In every high-stakes transaction, the premium flows to whoever takes uncertainty off your head. Nobody has ever paid extra for chocolates on moving day.

Now the obvious objection. If batteries die and government offices move at their own speed, is certainty a false promise? Certainty does not mean a guarantee that nothing will go wrong. In a business of used machines and public paperwork, that guarantee would itself be a lie, and customers can smell it. The real line runs between a problem and a mystery. A dead battery that we catch, tell the customer about, and put a named person on is a problem. The same battery discovered by the customer and followed by silence is a mystery. Mysteries destroy this purchase, because a mystery spreads. One of our procurement colleagues sends sellers a short video: here is the price I am putting on your car, and here is my reason. The seller often still dislikes the number, but he stops wondering. An RC delayed by thirty days, with a person the customer trusts saying it will come, is bearable. The same delay in silence is not. And the test does not stop at delivery. A warranty only removes uncertainty if the customer knows what it covers, who owns their claim, and when the repair will happen. Without those answers, the paper means nothing, and a claim met with silence is just the dead battery again, months later. Not every answer in this business is a product answer. Some answers are human answers. That is the nature of the category.

Against this bar, I want to be straight about where Cars24 stands. We are not a customer-obsessed company yet. We are trying to become one. The same customer who found the dead battery showed me his app: documents pending, it said, after he had already handed over the RC and the insurance. He has done his part, and our own screen does not seem to know. There are hundreds and thousands of such things inside our machine. Our first wave of success came from digitising this industry. The next wave has to go deeper. If a battery problem never made it into any system, the customer's conversation with us should still surface it and trigger the repair. That is why our two priorities are AI and customer experience, and why I think they are really one priority. And where software runs out, a person has to step in, hold the customer's hand and say, do not worry, I will do it for you. Then actually do it. Growth starts from there.

Strip everything away and that is what the customer is asking for at every step. Do not worry, I will do it for you. For the car, for the money, for the papers. Whoever can say that sentence and make it true at the exact moments of doubt will win this category. We cannot fully say it today. But I now have the test for every screen, every call, every review: more certain, or less. The customer already knows the first drive he wants to take and who he wants in the passenger seat. The distance between his doubt and that drive is our entire business.