The company
Marks & Spencer, also known as M&S, is a leading British retailer that offers quality food, clothing, and homeware products at great value to millions of customers worldwide.
Since its founding in 1884, the company has expanded to over 1,500 stores, operates 100 websites across 70+ markets, and serves 4M app users in its clothing and home business.
Sreena Jamieson, Head of Online Business Change at M&S, is responsible for driving change across the company's platforms.
Before M&S, Sreena spent 6 years working at Tesco and 10 years at Comet, an electrical retailer. Throughout her career, she's worked across online and marketing roles in retail because she “loves the fast-paced environment and putting the customer at the heart of everything.”
The challenge
Sreena and her team face a constant balancing act between commercially-focused decisions and a customer-first experience. Their goals are to grow lifetime customer value, establish M&S as a credible style-led fashion retailer, and put the customer at the heart of everything.
Like many retailers, M&S faces constant fluctuation in trade performance, says Sreena. “All retailers have weeks when they do well and when they don’t do so well. Part of the trading team’s role is to respond to that in a quick and agile way."
The demand to react quickly has increased, too. Sreena notes “the past couple of years have been very interesting because customers have become unpredictable, and their behavior has been unprecedented. Up until that point, retail had been relatively cyclical and predictable.”
The solution
To get started, the M&S team learned best practices from Contentsquare’s professional services team through bespoke training and face-to-face sessions.
“The team at Contentsquare also gave us lots of useful insight and examples from other retailers to help us kickstart how we could use specific tools,” Sreena says.
Now, they make decisions with a few of their most-used capabilities in Contentsquare's Experience Intelligence platform:
1. Fine-tuning landing pages with Heatmaps
Landing pages are a digital customer’s first impression, but getting them just right takes testing. The M&S team uses Contentsquare's Heatmaps capability to understand how landing pages perform and which tiles and modules on those pages drive the most interactions or visits. Then, the team uses these insights to prioritize page optimizations.
Contentsquare's Heatmaps analysis on the M&S website
Contentsquare gives us additional data, helping us find new insights we’ve never ever had before. We can identify where customer pain points may be and also what customers are engaging with on the site.
2. Find drop-off points with Journey Analysis
Using Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis capability, the M&S team visualizes customer journeys to identify areas where customers struggle or drop off. The faster the team can find problems, the quicker they can respond.
Journey Analysis visually represents what our customers are doing. It’s great when presenting the data to our commercial teams. Dropping in a table can be boring and flat, so sharing insights in Contentsquare brings the data to life.
3. Present insights to stakeholders with Contentsquare
Part of the team’s job is presenting their results and plans to stakeholders, so it’s important to lead with understandable and actionable data. For this, Sreena turns to Contentsquare’s Heatmaps.
The Heatmaps capability overlays data directly on the site without users needing to leave their browsers, allowing quick access to data that's understandable and shareable, making it easy for Sreena and her team to present actionable insights in meetings with senior management.
“It's probably one of the things that excites me most about Contentsquare. It’s easy to use, visual, and you get insights instantaneously,” Sreena notes.
The results
An all-in-one platform like Contentsquare has helped unite digital teams, bringing a “level of consistency of data across the business,“ shares Sreena. “It means when presenting to our leadership team, we refer to the same data. We can easily show different stakeholders why we shouldn’t be making decisions based on what we think, but according to data insights."
Contentsquare has empowered us to be truly data-led without it being a huge analysis exercise. I can pull up the website and enable the live zoning feature in Heatmaps to see what customers are interacting with. Within seconds I've got the data I need. It’s impossible to argue against.
When the M&S team first started using Contentsquare, Sreena was concerned about the time it took to get everyone on board. “We felt the adoption was a little bit slower than expected. Contentsquare's Customer Success Managers shared our adoption rates and compared us against competitors to show how we were fairing. I appreciated that candor so we could do something about it.”
What’s stuck with me about Contentsquare is that you get much more than just a platform—it’s a strategic relationship. Our Contentsquare Customer Success Managers want to understand what our strategic priorities are and how they can help us deliver our objectives.
Now, teams from across the organization use Contentsquare:
The product teams use it to design new features
The website optimization, content, and imagery teams use it to analyze product detail pages
The UX teams use it during customer journey design
The analytics team uses it to perform in-depth analysis to support multiple stakeholders across the business