Matalan saw a +400% ROI within 9 months of using Hotjar by Contentsquare

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.

In just 9 months using Hotjar by Contentsquare, Matalan:

• Improved checkout conversions by +1.23% after fixing issues highlighted by Session Recordings

• Saw a +17% increase in the number of winning AB tests based on user-driven data collected with Incoming Feedback and Polls

• Built a bespoke Hotjar by Contentsquare dashboard with Google Data Studio, which has transformed the decision-making process within the company

• Delivered +400% ROI by resolving the issues highlighted by Hotjar by Contentsquare findings

With over 200 stores and a newly redesigned ecommerce website, their mission is “to provide outstanding value for modern families”—and they have been using Hotjar by Contentsquare to make sure their online customers have the same positive browsing and shopping experience they would have in store. Karl Rowlands (UX Manager), Lucy Walton (UX Optimization Analyst) and Darryl Monks (UX Designer/Developer) manage customer feedback, conversion rate optimization, and the overall UX experimentation roadmap on matalan.co.uk. We caught up with them to hear about how Hotjar by Contentsquare has impacted their team and the overall business.

Challenges

Matalan created a User Experience function for their ecommerce site, assembling a team just under 2 years ago to ensure that they always have the user at the heart of their business. The team Karl and Lucy belong to started out on a limited budget, and only had access to quantitative data; the closest they came to qualitative insight was user surveys, which back then they found costly and rather intrusive for their users.

The team also struggled with the time it took to onboard new tools into their tech stack, due to existing corporate governance policies. As a result, most of the initial decision-making was based on intuition and gut feel, rather than on solid data points. Although they tracked and measured the impact of the changes they were making, Karl and Lucy never knew the reasons behind the impact in the first place. There was a large gap in how and why decisions were made, and that gap was user feedback:

We didn't really understand exactly why things were happening. So we knew that we needed a tool that would help us understand what our customers think, and understand the why behind everything we do.

How Hotjar by Contentsquare helped

Initially, Karl and Lucy looked to Hotjar by Contentsquare as a solution to survey their customers in a non-intrusive manner. As Matalan moved from an adaptive website to a fully responsive solution, the team used Hotjar by Contentsquare to capture insights pre- & post- migration, so they could understand their customers’ reaction to the change.

Pretty soon, they started seeing the value in other tools in the Hotjar by Contentsquare suite. For example, session recordings allowed them to spot bugs and glitches and resolve them early on, rather than at the end of the migration process. They also used Incoming Feedback to identify issues, and watched the companion recordings to see individual journeys leading to them.In doing so, they found a few holes in the checkout process. Resolving one of the bugs identified led them to a fantastic result: they improved checkout conversion by +1.23%.

Hotjar by Contentsquare really empowers you to be able to see exactly what your users are doing, how they’re feeling and ultimately their reactions to the changes you make. Without Hotjar by Contentsquare we would still be making decisions based on gut instinct instead of qualitative user feedback.

Karl Rowlands

UX Manager

Relying more and more on Hotjar by Contentsquare to create user-driven hypotheses for their A/B tests, Karl & Lucy saw a +17% increase in the number of their winning experiments.

They also decided to build a bespoke dashboard to integrate Incoming feedback within Google Data Studio: their UX Experience Dashboard allows the team to drill deeper into each piece of feedback they get, categorize them by theme, and assign ownership to other stakeholders across the business.