The company
ASOS is a destination for fashion-lovers around the world, with the purpose to give its customers the confidence to be whoever they want to be. Through its app and web experience, available in 10 languages, ASOS customers can shop a curated edit of over 100,000 products, sourced from nearly 900 global and local partner brands alongside a mix of fashion-led, own-brand labels.
ASOS aims to give its 26.7 million customers a truly frictionless experience, with an ever-greater number of different payment methods and hundreds of local delivery and return options dispatched from state-of-the-art fulfilment centres in the U.K., U.S., and Germany.
We sat down with Roger Howard, Head of Returns and Digital Trading at ASOS. He shed light on his biggest challenges, the brand’s future plans, and how Contentsquare helps them to be more data-driven.
About Roger and his team
Roger has been at ASOS for more than 10 years. After spending 7 years in merchandising, he went on to set up a new pricing function and now heads up the fashion destination’s digital trading team.
“We’ve been working to embed actionable insight and a trading mentality across all our teams. Contentsquare is one of the final pieces of the puzzle. A big part of my team’s role is using the platform daily to understand insights and the improvements we can make," he says.
The challenge
“My team is responsible for managing the order of the products that appear on the site and working with our AI team to manage personalisation," says Roger. "Prior to partnering with Contentsquare, we didn’t have the visibility we wanted into important metrics like scroll rate or exposure rate, for example.”
Roger explains that his team also wanted more clarity on their 20-something customers’ digital journeys. “I think whether you work in an office or from home, it’s easy to build up an image of how customers shop or use your site," he says. "If you look after menswear jeans or womenswear dresses, it’s easy to start thinking that the way you navigate the site as an ASOS employee, is also how ASOS customers shop.”
ASOS homepage
We want to take the emotion out of decision making by actually showing the data, and not making decisions made based on whoever shouts the loudest.
The solution
What was it that stood out to you about Contentsquare?
“Ease of use, the availability of information at your fingertips, and instant insights,” Roger says. “Our mindset is: how can we get quick insights into what we think is happening? We don’t want to wait until the end of the week to analyze something. Contentsquare provides us with the real-time data we need.”
The Contentsquare platform not only enables Roger’s team to optimize site navigation, but also other teams within ASOS. “I could see early on that this tool will benefit multiple functions, not just my team.”
What are you most excited about when it comes to Contentsquare?
Contentsquare’s initial analysis provided Roger’s team with optimization recommendations immediately. “We found that the alphabetical order of our navigation in one of our markets meant that only 20% of people were being exposed to our biggest product type,” Roger explains.
“So, what I’m most excited about is the number of things we can improve quickly and see the benefit of. After making changes, the next day we can immediately check Contentsquare to see how our customers interact with it," Roger says.
Now people have started presenting Contentsquare back to me. It’s created a bit of a buzz around the organization. For example, our tech and product teams are excited because they’ll get more insight into what new features we should be creating.
How does Contentsquare fit into your wider strategy?
Roger says data is going to help fuel international sales growth and their U.S. and European expansion. “We believe that our data-driven approach is going to help us become more locally relevant,” Roger explains. “We don’t want to look like a U.K. brand translated into German or French. We want to make sure everything we do is locally relevant, from our content and the product to the navigation and filters.”
This approach will also play a big role in ASOS’ new partner fulfillment program. “We’ve already onboarded Adidas and Reebok into the program. It’s the first time we’ve ever sold something fulfilled by another provider," says Roger.
And there are big plans to onboard further relevant brands by the end of the year—this will change our delivery proposition and our customer relationships."
Insights derived from Contentsquare's Experience Intelligence platform will give the brand a better understanding of digital behaviors, helping them optimize their customer experience.
“We’re only just learning about the economics of the new fulfillment program," says Roger. "It might drive a certain amount of additional revenue, but it’s also an additional cost. That’s why we need to understand how customers respond to it. Contentsquare will play a role in helping us understand that.”
What's next
From the digital trading team to the insights and AI team, and content marketing team, Roger says that a number of teams will benefit from Contentsquare.
“There are so many potential use cases for it. My team uses it for navigation and customer journey analysis, the insights team will use it to find shifts in customer behavior over time, the content marketing team will use it to benchmark the quality of our content; the list goes on!”
We're delighted to be partnering with ASOS to help them improve their understanding of customer behavior across web and app. The fact that they’ve invested in our full suite of products, coupled with this being an executive-led initiative to put the customer at the heart of everything they do, makes me excited about the future of our partnership.
