The company
The Co-op group is one of the world’s largest consumer co-operatives with businesses in food, retail, wholesale, funeral care, insurance, and legal services. Its food retail business, Co-op Food, has around over 2,500 brick-and-mortar stores and an online grocery store.
Co-op Food now has an online offer from over 2,000 stores, through its own online shop shop.coop.co.uk and through strategic partners including Deliveroo, Uber Eats, Amazon Prime, and robot deliveries with Starship Technologies.
The challenge
Before Contentsquare, Co-op Food’s digital team used Google Analytics, but was not set up to draw meaningful insights from the data. The team also relied heavily on in-store metrics and sales data, not fully taking into account their new online customer and their digital journey.
The team needed a tool that would be “quick to implement and easy to use by a wide range of stakeholders,” says Gareth Cottiss, Senior Ecommerce Merchandising Manager at Co-op Food. So, they turned to Contentsquare’s visual Experience Intelligence platform to better understand their digital customer.
The key selling point of Contentsquare was its ease of implementation and impressive client success program. Knowing we’d get dedicated support from Contentsquare while onboarding and upskilling made the decision easy.
The solution
The platform's deployment was done in partnership with Contentsquare’s Account Managers and Product Specialists.
“They gave great advice and showed us examples from work with other clients, as well as sharing their time and expertise when needed,” Gareth says. To further support the democratization of data across the business, Joanna Kowalik, Data Analyst at Co-op Food was brought in to join Gareth's team.
I love Contentsquare because it makes it easy to increase data engagement across teams because nobody's scared away by massive tables or complicated tracking.
How different digital teams across Co-op Food benefit from Contentsquare
The engineering team: to uncover site errors
The engineering team uses Contentsquare to uncover the ‘why’ behind any website errors. “We had an issue where, for example, we could see a drop off at the payment stage but couldn't understand why,” says Joanna. Contentsquare's Journey Analysis capability showed customers weren’t leaving the site but were being moved back to the basket.
By setting up Contentsquare's Session Replay capability for that specific customer segment, the engineering team reviewed customer sessions to uncover what caused the error and was able to correct it.
UX researchers and designers: to gain deeper insight into tests
The UX team use Session Replay to get a detailed view of how customers interact on-site. Contentsquare is also integrated with their A/B testing tool, Adobe Target, to provide deeper insight into their new feature experiments.
Co-op Food's website
Activity team and merchandising team: to optimize campaigns
The activity team uses Contentsquare to analyze and review their on-site seasonal events. “We share Contentsquare insights with the wider business, as well as our in-store colleagues,” Gareth says. The merchandising team uses Contentsquare's Heatmaps capability to review banner performance and sponsored products. Contentsquare dashboards are set up to enable both teams to monitor the performance of campaigns.
Media agency: to gain brand insights
Co-op Food works with its media agency to sell and monitor brand placements on its site. Contentsquare provides an additional layer of insight for brands. “Being able to show how users interact with a campaign or banner is really powerful," Gareth says. "It makes those campaigns perform better going forward and also allows us to show the value back to brands."
Our ongoing relationship with Contentsquare is incredibly collaborative. Their team has been as driven as our internal colleagues to better understand our online customers and optimize the wealth of data available to make tangible changes to improve the shopping experience. The level of adoption internally is a testament to the benefit we have seen and also a reflection of their product innovation, with their recent merchandising product taking our trading insights to the next level. Ultimately it is a very fruitful partnership.
The results
11x return on investment (ROI) with Contentsquare
Contentsquare played a pivotal role in democratizing data across Co-op Food. Co-op has gone from 6 active to over 30 active users spread across 5 different teams. “The platform has found a natural home across multiple teams, which is great,” says Gareth.
“It’s also helped us to prioritize improvements; with a long list of things we want to achieve, making sure our prioritization is right is crucial. That’s been key to our growth over the past two years.”
Contentsquare has helped us develop our understanding of online shopper behavior, putting insights into the hands of the people who can take action.
What’s next?
Co-op Food recently implemented Contentsquare's Merchandise Analysis capability to enable product-level insights and data-driven decision-making on how to display products on the website. “It’ll help us talk to the wider business about performance online, in a language they’ll understand,” Gareth shares.
Our partnership with Contentsquare was driven by a desire to gain a detailed understanding of how our shoppers behave online with the aim of delivering a seamless and frictionless experience. With shoppers’ habits constantly evolving, Contentsquare is as critical as ever in ensuring every change we make to the site is data-driven and reflects how our customers behave. It’s been great to see teams collaborate and get excited about data due to the visual nature of the tool. If you are after quick, actionable insights Contentsquare is a great option.
