Key metrics
2.4 percentage point increase in NPS in two months
Millions of Black Friday sales associated with Contentsquare insights
15% conversion rate increase from the Black Friday Hub webpage
Halfords x Contentsquare
How Contentsquare helped Halfords increase NPS by 2.4 percentage points in 2 months
The company
Halfords is the UK’s leading provider of motoring and cycling products and services online and in-store. As a truly omnichannel business, the group operates 393 retail stores and 643 garages, along with a fleet of 748 vehicles offering services on the move.
Following an extensive website re-platforming and an increase in online business during the recent pandemic, Hannah Beasant, Digital Optimization Manager at Halfords and her team wanted to use Contentsquare’s Experience Intelligence Platform to better understand user behavior, improve customer experience and increase sales.
The challenge
After a period of rapid growth in online sales, Hannah and her team were keen to maintain this momentum post-lockdown. How could they leverage Halford’s unique service offering to provide the best deals and customer journeys online?
They implemented Contentsquare. Hannah and her colleague Kelsey Studley, Halfords’ Digital Journeys Optimization Executive became super users of the platform. After early success, Hannah and Kelsey were keen to optimize the platform’s ROI and encourage wider usage across the rest of the business, particularly during peak season periods such as Black Friday and Christmas.
“Contentsquare is very well integrated and well respected in our business. It’s so important for people to understand and believe in the data, so they can take actions from it with confidence.”
Hannah Beasant
Digital Optimization Manager, Halfords
The solution
Halfords leveraged Contentsquare’s Professional Services to help them optimize results over the peak period. Hannah and Kelsey jumped at the chance to bring Contentsquare’s analysts together with a cross-functional team of Halford experts over a series of in-person and remote Black Friday war room sessions.
The experience was intense. “Having everyone in the room and having representatives from other teams meant we could make really fast decisions and we can take really fast actions,” Hannah explains.
Using the Contentsquare platform, the team uncovered over 60 actionable insights. Focusing on the quick wins, Halfords’ merchandising and content teams made fast, configurable changes within hours, resulting in significant, measurable improvements, for example:
The solution
1. Optimizing Halfords’ Black Friday Spend & Save ad
Halford’s Spend & Save digital advert had been a centerpiece of its Black Friday hub page for years. “It's a marketing message we’ve used hundreds of times before and we'd always market it in exactly the same way,” Hannah says. “It's got all the relevant information for the customers on that spot. It should have done really well…”
However, when Halfords analyzed the ad using Contentsquare, they saw that its attractiveness rate was low—website visitors just weren’t clicking on it at a high rate. The same analysis also revealed that those visitors who did click on the ad went on to convert at an extremely high rate.
“So we went back and we worked with our marketing team and we condensed the message down to its headline message,” Hannah says.
The attractiveness rate of the new, revised ad increase significantly—as did conversions.
Hannah believes the key to success was getting customers to understand the promotional message before they clicked on it, something Halfords would have struggled to discover without Contentsquare.
If we hadn’t used Contentsquare to monitor that ad, we might have just removed the ad and lost out on all the sales it ended up bringing us.
Hannah Beasant
Digital Optimization Manager, Halfords
The solution
2. Using Contentsquare to improve NPS
Having set up and spread the digital war room mentality in multiple teams across Halfords, Hannah and Kelsey next turned their attention to the company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Although they had been using Medallia, a Voice of Customer platform, to collate NPS and customer feedback, there remained an issue around fully understanding customers’ negative feedback.
“When someone's writing quickly in a comment box, it's hard to understand exactly what they were talking about. And it was hard to take an action from it,” Hannah says.
Upon integrating Medallia with Contentsquare, each piece of customer feedback could now be reviewed in Session Replay. Hannah and her team were able to see exactly what visitors did before leaving a comment, allowing them to understand precisely what they needed to change to improve the customer experience.
Without the integration between Medallia and Contentsquare, we would have continued to focus on the wrong thing.
Hannah Beasant
Digital Optimization Manager, Halfords
The results
Thanks to its Black Friday War Room campaign, Halfords has achieved positive results:
- +42% increase in the attractiveness rate of the revised Black Friday Spend & Save ad
- +15% conversion rate increase from Black Friday Hub webpage
- Millions of Black Friday sales traceable to the actionable insights provided by Contentsquare
As a result of Halford’s successful integration of Voice of Customer data into the Contentsquare platform, the company was able to improve its customer experience, leading to:
- A 2.4 percentage point increase in NPS after just 2 months
What’s next
Having experienced such great success actioning quick wins from the insights gleaned from Contentsquare, Hannah and Kelsey have been encouraging wider adoption across the business to enable self-serve.
This will empower other teams to make data-driven decisions on a range of BAU functions around website merchandising, content and layouts.
