We sat down with Ollie Scheers, CTO at Huel, to chat about why he chose Contentsquare to drive Huel’s impressive growth, by helping to understand and improve their customer experience online.

About Ollie and his team

As CTO, Ollie looks after the Engineering, UX, Data, and Insights teams. Their major priorities are continuing to improve their product range, expand into new markets, and trial new channels. 

“A lot of our focus is on how we can continue to improve the experience for customers across our different products, markets, and channels, having the right infrastructure to go into these quickly, all whilst continuing to offer that high level of experience and service.”

How did you hear about Contentsquare?

Ollie gives us our dream response: “I actually heard about Contentsquare through word of mouth. An ex-colleague had talked about Contentsquare at a meetup and how great they were – which instantly put them on our radar. I thought, okay, people I respect in the industry are talking about Contentsquare, big brands I know are moving to Contentsquare, so we decided to kick off the conversation with a product demo.”

 

So what was it about Contentsquare that stood out to you?

“The demo was one of the best I’ve seen. I was super impressed with the level of insight it gave. What sold it to me was the ease of use, how intuitive it was, and how clearly it played back the insights.”

It turns out, during the product demo itself, Contentsquare spotted five opportunities on Huel’s website to improve conversion. Five.

Ollie shares his favorite: “One of the insights we found was whilst looking at Journey Analysis. Customers were landing on a particular product, were then bouncing back to the homepage, then re-finding that same product again! So there was clearly some confusion as they’d landed on the product they wanted, not realized it, and frustratingly gone back to search for it.”

 

Where can you see Contentsquare adding value?

Journey Analysis is going to be one of the most insightful features for Huel to understand how people are moving around the site. Ollie explains, “As we expand our product range, marketing channels, and regions, we want to answer so many questions, such as:

  • How are customers entering our site?
    Which different parts of the website are they landing on?
  • Where do they go on from those pages?
  • How are customers discovering products?”

Screenshot of Contentsquare's Journey Analysis sunburst tool

“We’re also keen to understand how customers are using our subscription area and find opportunities to improve that experience. So we’re not just focusing on conversion rates, but how we can encourage more customers to try more of the product range, increasing Average Order Value, and what we can do in our subscription areas to improve retention and reduce churn.”

 

Huel is going through an impressive surge in growth. Why Contentsquare, and why now?

Huel is just 6 years old, and this year has announced a whopping run-rate of over $100m. They’ve sold 150 million meals over 100 countries, and are on a mission to make nutritionally complete, convenient, affordable food, with minimal impact on animals and the environment.

“For us, at the scale and the size we are right now, Contentsquare just made sense. When a customer comes to Huel or considers Huel, we want to be able to really understand how we can improve that experience, and convince them to become a Hueligan.”

At the start, Huel was using free tools like Google Analytics and Google Optimize. They did an okay job to get them going, but the team quickly outgrew the insight they could get from them. They needed better event tracking and a better understanding of what customers were doing across all websites.

“We knew what was happening on our site, we had also implemented a new experimentation tool, but there was a gap between the two. Contentsquare brings us the why. It fills in that gap so we have insight into explaining why our customers’ behavior, or why an experiment wins or fails.”

 

Who’s getting their hands on Contentsquare?

Ollie explains that a big part of choosing Contentsquare was putting the right tools in the hands of various teams and people across the business.“Whether that’s Front End Engineering teams, UX, Trading, eCommerce, and Merchandising teams – everyone’s excited to get their hands on Contentsquare. People can’t wait to get access and start looking at how they can start improving the experience for customers.”

“We’re going to put Contentsquare in the hands of everyone who can take action from it, and that’s a lot of people. That was a big driver of what sold it to me.”

 

You’re recommending us to a pal in the industry. You have 30 seconds. Go!

“No pressure! So at Huel, we talk a lot about “speed wins”, in other words, how important it is in a competitive environment to be fast and make decisions quickly. And that’s what Contentsquare does. It gives us that speed to insight quicker, a lot quicker. So if speed of insight is important to you, Contentsquare is where it’s at. The level of insight it gives back, the ease of use, how easy it is to understand – this all sold it to me.”

 

A little word from Jake at Contentsquare

“I was always super impressed with Huel’s digital maturity during our conversations. It’s so clear that understanding customer behavior is critical, regardless of the number of products sold by a business. Once we agreed on the additional value Contentsquare would provide their team to quickly identify growth opportunities, it was pretty easy to build a growth plan.”

Jake Stroyan, Contentsquare

 

About Contentsquare

We’re on a mission to give every digital team the ability to measure how their actions affect the user experience on their website, mobile sites, and apps. Not just the analysts. Not just some of the time. Not just some of the data.

Our platform tracks billions of digital interactions and turns these behaviors into intelligent recommendations everyone can use to improve digital experiences, grow revenue, and fuel innovation.

 

About Huel

Huel (Human + Fuel) is nutritionally complete food. This means every Huel meal contains a balance of all 26 essential vitamins and minerals, protein, essential fats, carbs, fiber, and phytonutrients in a single product. 

It was started by Julian Hearn in June 2015 with a mission. “To make nutritionally complete, convenient, affordable food, with minimal impact on animals and the environment.” Huel is made from plant-based sustainable ingredients like oats, pea, rice, flaxseed, coconut, and sunflower, and it is available in a range of four products: Powder, Black Edition, Complete Protein, Hot & Savoury, Ready-to-drink, and Bars.