This customer story was originally published on Hotjar.com and reflects the customer’s experience with its product offering. Following Hotjar's integration under the Contentsquare legal group, this customer story has been migrated to this site [Contentsquare.com] as part of our unified content experience.
Canyon Bicycles (Canyon) is a world-renowned manufacturer of performance bicycles and cycling gear and accessories. Sarah Wilson-Reissmann, Canyon’s UX team lead, uses Hotjar by Contentsquare to address the common problem of ‘data without context’ and bridge the gap between qualitative and quantitative insights.
Canyon 🤝 Hotjar by Contentsquare: a summary
📌 The requirement: the user experience (UX) team at Canyon needed a way to contextualize numeric data from traditional analytics tools and understand not only what was happening on Canyon’s website, but why.
💡 The solution: the team made Surveys, Session Replay, and Heatmaps part of its workflow to achieve 3 important outcomes.
Effortless bug-spotting and issue resolution with feedback collection
Streamlined user research and recruitment through targeted survey
Continuous monitoring and error-tracking via Session Replay and Heatmaps
🏆 The results:
With always-on feedback flowing in from multiple users, spotting bugs and areas for improvement has become a seamless practice
Participant recruitment surveys placed on specific pages ensure a steady stream of usability testing participants
Multiple teams can jump between quantitative and qualitative data and share important discoveries with one another
Turning analytics into action
As the leader of a team of UX and content designers on the broader Digital Experience Design team, Sarah’s focus lies in crafting an optimal customer experience for Canyon’s audience. Canyon is the world’s biggest direct-to-consumer bicycle brands and sells exclusively online, so a high-performing website is, in Sarah’s words, “absolutely essential—we would not be able to present our products, help our customers make decisions, and ultimately, get our bikes into people's homes otherwise.”
She embedded Hotjar by Contentsquare’s tools in her team’s workflow at various stages of the customer journey to add color and context to numerical data from traditional analytics tools.
Analytics can be UX’s frenemy—it gives you data without context. When I first found Hotjar by Contentsquare, I thought, whoa! This is exactly what I need to bring a qualitative understanding to quantitative data.
Today, Canyon’s UX team uses Hotjar by Contentsquare for 3 primary purposes:
Feedback collection to hear from users and uncover bugs or issues on the site
Surveys for easy user research and recruitment for usability testing
Session Replay and Heatmaps to continuously monitor the website and track errors
Cultivating a UX mindset starts here 👇
Back in November 2023, Sarah was featured as a speaker at a Hotjar by Contentsquare event. She dove deep into the topic of building empathy for customers using tools like Hotjar by Contentsquare.
Check out her presentation below for some additional background and inspiration, or keep reading for actionable ways she and her team use Hotjar by Contentsquare to put customers at the heart of their decision-making.
3 ways Canyon uses Hotjar by Contentsquare to improve its UX
1. Feedback to spot bugs
Sarah and a UX designer on her team use the feedback collection button widget to monitor customer sentiment in English and German, the company’s biggest markets.
Canyon’s commitment to putting customers at the heart of everything involves continuous improvement and learning from feedback and data. This is why Sarah’s team reviews responses several times a week, helping them stay aware of users’ experiences navigating Canyon’s website.
Sarah says that this always-on, direct feedback from customers helps the team uncover bugs and issues at certain points in the customer journey. It’s also enabled them to uncover website areas that are missing information customers regularly search for.
Surveys is what brings me to Hotjar by Contentsquare most frequently. It gives us the opportunity to check what’s going on for our customers and pass any specific issues along to the relevant teams.
2. Surveys for user research and usability testing
Canyon’s website gets hundreds of thousands of visitors each month, many of them loyal advocates who are enthusiastic about connecting with the Canyon team. To take full advantage of this active, engaged audience, Sarah and her team use Hotjar by Contentsquare to place targeted surveys on different parts of Canyon’s website.
This helps them achieve 3 goals:
1. 📋 Understanding how customers prioritize bike features: prioritization surveys give Sarah and her team insight into what’s most important to Canyon’s customers, influencing information hierarchy on product listing pages and providing insight into what people care about the most
2. ✅ Conducting content testing and customer satisfaction surveys: user feedback on Canyon’s website content ensures continuous, customer-centric content optimizations, while customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys enable Sarah’s team to determine short-term satisfaction levels at key moments in the customer journey
3.👩🔬 Recruiting participants for user research and usability testing: by placing a user testing recruitment survey on relevant pages, Sarah and her team can connect with users at exactly the right moment, ensuring a steady influx of willing participants
One of our primary goals as a UX team is to understand the customer’s journey and what they’re doing on the website. Surveys give us the ability to reach out to people in context—we can just pop a survey on a page we want insights on.
3. Session Replay and heatmaps for error-tracking and continuous monitoring
Heatmaps and Session Replay enable the UX team to jump from quantitative to qualitative data in moments: Heatmaps provide an aggregate view of where groups of users click, move, and scroll, while Session Replay enables you to zoom in on individual users’ journeys and behaviors.
For Sarah, these tools are especially useful to “triangulate data from Google Analytics”. One example is her team’s Google Analytics checkout funnel, which shows where users drop off, but not why. “On a single page, there could be hundreds of potential reasons for users dropping off,” she says. “But in this case, we can use Hotjar by Contentsquare to watch session replays and track errors to figure out why.”
Doing so has resulted in finding several bugs in specific markets and site areas that need improvement—something Sarah says would simply not have been possible without Hotjar by Contentsqaure. It’s also the reason she tries to make watching recordings a weekly habit.
On Fridays, I try to jump in and watch just 10-15 minutes of random session replays. Even if it’s not purpose-intended, it’s really helpful to stay in the empathy-building practice of watching how users move through our website and see where they stumble, get lost, or abandon the site. This is one way we can stay on top of delighting our customers—by figuring out what isn't working well for them and finding ways to improve it.
Making Hotjar by Contentquare a team activity
It’s not just Canyon’s UX team benefiting from Hotjar by Contentsquare—the ecommerce merchandising and CRM teams both use Heatmaps and Session Replay for their own purposes.
When one team discovers an insight that’s too juicy not to share, they tag one another in comments to pass on relevant information, making cross-functional collaboration a little easier.
A customer-centric culture starts with watching, listening, and learning
Canyon’s success stems from a team that cares deeply for its customers, collectively working toward providing a truly delightful customer journey. Proactive, continuous monitoring places Canyon’s UX team consistently attuned to their customers’ pain points and needs—but it’s no secret that this approach requires work.
Hotjar by Contentsquare makes their job easier.
By using the platform's tools as an effortless link between numeric and non-numeric data, Sarah and her team have fostered an in-depth understanding of their customers that improves business growth and brand loyalty, ensuring Canyon retains its well-earned reputation as one of the world’s most innovative and inspiring bike brands.
