Royal Design aims to meet Online Consumer Needs with UX Analysis

As the Nordics’ leading eCommerce company in design, furniture and home furnishings, Royal Design continuously strives to create the best online shopping experience for its global customers. The company has recently embarked on a digital reorganization, and has partnered with UX Analytics company, ContentSquare, to ensure every change is a strategic step to meet the dynamic needs and expectations of its online consumers.

Contentsquare Marketing Manager, Camila Florez, sat down with Royal Design Head of eCommerce and Omnichannel, Martin Magnusson, to further discuss the company’s drivers and objectives, and the importance of UX Analytics in its journey.

 

What do you think sets Royal Design apart from other companies in the same field?

History is definitely a big part of the company. Royal Design has been online since 1999. It has been almost 20 years, which none of our competitors can live up to.

 

Describe your target market and the typical customer of Royal Design. What are their online customer journey needs? How does your website address those needs?

Royal design operates on 13 country markets, mainly in the Nordics— Sweden and Norway being our strongest markets.

Since we have more than 80 000 products online, the site structure and navigation are the most important user-needs that we need to address. Our users expect to find what they are looking for quickly; as well as having a fast and easy checkout experience. Accessibility across devices, particularly the shift to mobile, is extremely important too. We need to deliver a solid and speedy user experience.

Unfortunately, our website— which had the same online look and feel for the past 10 years— does not live up to the high expectations of a modern online customer.

“ We realized that the business had outgrown the website, and a big change was needed. “

Hence, we’ve launched a brand new omnichannel platform site. It is a best in breed solution with a great platform that takes care of each part of the application. The front-end application is a custom built react application focused on:

 

Why did Royal Design choose to work with ContentSquare?

Before we launched the redesigned website, we wanted to have a powerful tool to analyze the behavior of the current site to avoid making the same mistakes on the new one.

Martin Magnusson, Head of eCommerce and  Omnichannel

We needed to take that deep dive into the customer journeys, understand the pain points and take action which we never fully understood before.

ContentSquare can provide all of these. It is a great tool for several different teams of the organization; such as, Tech, eCommerce, Purchasing and Marketing. It also gives us a better way to understand differences between traffic sources and setting up KPIs.

Questions such as, “Why does social convert better than search?” can now be answered with quantitative data generated through ContentSquare. It gives us more visual details compared to other tools (such as Google Analytics) and provides us the means to build custom site mappings and customer segments.

ContentSquare also helps with managing key partners such as NOSTO.

 

What was your primary expectation from the ContentSquare tool?

We expected that the ContentSquare tools will help us understand the pain points, visualize the customer journey and compare different user segments and behaviors. We expect it to be a powerful tool that will make us capable of optimizing conversions, understanding our customers, and improving Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) awareness in the company.

These numbers and insights have never been done in the company before. It’s like a blank page for us so this is a great tool for us to start exploring more.

 

What was the most urgent need that you wanted ContentSquare to address?

We needed ContentSquare to analyze the current website so as to optimize the new one. It is also necessary to establish this CRO mindset and UX analysis practice throughout the company, not just the eCommerce Team and Developers.

 

How many people are being trained in the use of UXA and from which teams?

We have about 10-12 employees being trained from the following departments: eCommerce, Marketing and Purchasing. It is crucial for everyone to start having the mindset of how to optimize online sales into each team.

 

Where do you see Royal Design evolving in the following years? Where do you see the partnership with ContentSquare fit with this evolution?

ContentSquare is very important in all steps. They are crucial to help us understand

 

Personal note

 I would like to see more people in Royal Design using the ContentSquare tools— start coming with their own CRO ideas, talking about customer journeys and conversion, etc.

We at Royal Design are really happy about the close partnership with ContentSquare. We really appreciate the proactive approach of the company and our dedicated Customer Success Manager, Lovisa Dahlbacka.

 

The future

The new website was just launched last October 2018, we will continue growing in our key markets, but also start expanding new markets. The plan is to have dedicated eCommerce resources for every market to ensure better quality, better awareness and better customer experience.

We hope we can offer a great shopping experience on more channels, such as in local apps, in store screens, voice, and so on. Royal Design is also looking into the exciting development of AI and how we can apply it in different parts of the company.