The company
Halfords is the U.K.’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.
Key metrics
2.4 percentage point increase in NPS in 2 months
+15% increase in conversion rate from the Black Friday Hub webpage
Millions of Black Friday sales associated with Contentsquare insights
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 decided to implement Contentsquare's Experience Analytics product.
Hannah and her colleague Kelsey Studley, Digital Journeys Optimization Executive at Halfords, became super users of the platform. After early success, Hannah and Kelsey were keen to optimize the platform’s return on investment (ROI) and encourage wider usage across the rest of the business, particularly during peak season periods such as Black Friday and Christmas.
The solution
Halfords leveraged Contentsquare’s Professional Services team 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 take really fast actions,” Hannah explains.
Using Contentsquare, the team uncovered 60+ actionable insights.
Focusing on the quick wins, Halfords’ merchandising and content teams made fast, configurable changes within hours, resulting in significant, measurable improvements. Here are 2 examples:
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 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 advert increased 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.
2. Using Contentsquare to improve NPS
Having set up and spread the digital war room mentality across multiple teams at Halfords, Hannah and Kelsey next turned their attention to the company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Although they'd been using Medallia, a Voice-of-Customer (VoC) platform, to collate NPS and customer feedback, there remained an issue around fully understanding their 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 was reviewed using Contentsquare's Session Replay capability. 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.
The results
Thanks to the Black Friday war room sessions, 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 its VoC 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 business-as-usual (BAU) functions around website merchandising, content, and layouts.