John Lewis & Partners x Contentsquare

How John Lewis & Partners is increasing speed to insight with Contentsquare

The context

Before joining the John Lewis & Partners team as App Experience Design Manager, Antonio Arevalo was already an experienced user of Contentsquare’s Experience Intelligence Platform—and a passionate advocate for user experience (UX) analytics. 

From day one at John Lewis, Antonio made it his mission to spread platform adoption as widely and deeply as possible, knowing that this would lead to many significant UX improvements. 

"
When I was first introduced to Contentsquare five years ago, I was blown away by the power of the tool for team collaboration, providing insights, and creating an understanding of what customers are doing on your website."

Antonio Arevalo

App Experience Design Manager

Key metrics

+27.3% increase in engagement on campaign banners
4x more traffic to the John Lewis app from email
4x increase in Contentsquare users from 50 to 200 in 18 months

But he had to start small—and began by onboarding the business’s UX design community. 

The company’s designers had found the tool used prior to our platform difficult to use— which made them the perfect team to start with. Antonio knew that if he could get them to start using our platform, benefiting from it and singing its praises, this would help build company-wide confidence in the platform.

The challenge

Antonio’s ultimate goal is to foster a data-driven culture within the business, a culture in which teams can make better decisions with confidence, improve John Lewis’s digital experience and drive better results for the business. 

First, he had to get everybody on the same page, working with the same data—on the same platform.

"
Prior to Contentsquare we were using a different tool at John Lewis, but our designers struggled to adopt that tool. The main difference that Contentsquare brings is how easy it is to access insights and get people to the point where they're actually unlocking a lot of insights very, very quickly. That speed to insight comes easily as you upskill."

Antonio Arevalo

App Experience Design Manager

He’s also run platform boot camps to incentivize learning and build user confidence. To qualify for John Lewis’ boot camp, users must first pass key our Contentsquare certification courses or reach other specific usage milestones. 

Having successfully widened and deepened the use of our platform—from 50 to 200 users in just 18 months—John Lewis has made some impressive improvements to its digital journeys. 

Here are three great examples:

The solution

To optimize the use of our platform across John Lewis, Antonio has created a rigorous adoption and upskilling program. 

Finding internal champions and helping them become super users is a key step in the program. Antonio calls these champions ‘CS Ninjas’. They’re able to use our platform autonomously to unlock insights—and to provide support to other users within the business, helping them leverage insights better. 

This “creates the right conditions so that team members can have a ripple effect—that’s key,” says Antonio.

 

Customer Journey Analysis after landing and completing the writing a review journey.

1. Generating 4x more traffic to the John Lewis app via email

Wanting to increase the number of customers who left reviews on the John Lewis app, Antonio used Customer Journey Analysis to understand the user journeys of those customers who left a review. He then dug deeper to see which entry points to the app saw the highest review completion rate.

 

John Lewis and Partners customer review journey from email to app

Antonio found that customers asked to write reviews via email had the highest completion rate of all channels. However, emails took customers to the web browser, not to the app. 

The app experience team decided to link customers to the app via emails, hypothesizing that this small change would drive more traffic and increase review conversions in the app.

Sure enough, the “Write a Review” call to action is now driving four times more traffic to the app than before, and up to 60% of all customer app reviews are generated via the email channel. 

 

Zoning Analysis showed that overall engagement with the campaign and its touchpoints was higher than expected.

2. Driving a +27% increase in campaign banner engagement

Having launched one of John Lewis’s biggest members’ week campaigns, UX Designer Shai Mistry set out to measure the impact of banners placed across the website. 

He used Zone-Based Heatmaps to understand user engagement and Impact Quantification to measure the revenue contribution of users who interacted with campaign banners. 

To pull off the latter, Shai compared two segments: customers who interacted with the banners and purchased in the same session versus customers who didn’t interact with the campaign banners.

 

The good segment (on the left) and bad segment (on the right) with the impact on potential revenue loss identified via Impact Quantification.

The analysis showed that the campaign banners drove up to 4x higher engagement (between 12.9% and 27.3%) than they had targeted (7%). What’s more, customers who engaged with the campaign also had significantly higher AOV, revealing a potential revenue loss if the campaign banners weren’t shown to users. 

“Shai Mistry was able to use these insights to communicate campaign results effectively to stakeholders and make the case for placing more banners in other areas of the site.” 

 

Tap recurrence in zoning analysis on the order details section (on the left), click rate on the ‘help’ and ‘delivery’ links (in the middle) and the ‘can’t find the order they’re looking for’ link (on the right). 

3. Improving the post-purchase experience on app and web

Sophie Skinner, a UX Designer, used our platform to investigate possible ways to improve the post-purchase experience in both the app and on the website.

Using Zone-based Heatmaps to understand the tap rate and tap recurrence for different delivery types, Sophie discovered that 60% of interactions on the Order Details page were on recent orders. 

Customers repeatedly clicked on CTAs such as Help and Delivery, with 6.4% of customers clicking on “Can’t Find My Order”. All of this suggests that customers were struggling to find what they were looking for.

“All of Sophie Skinner’s work really helped the team focus on how they can help our customers find what they're looking for during post-purchase missions,” Antonio explains.

The results

As a result of using our platform, John Lewis has significantly increased its speed to insight. The UX design team has used data to create and prove significant customer experience improvements, leading to

  • 4x increase in Contentsquare platform users from 50 to 200 in just 18 months
  • 4x more traffic to the John Lewis app from email 
  • +60% of app reviews are now generated via the email channel
  • +27.3% increase in engagement on campaign banners – 4x higher than the target