How MillerKnoll uses Contentsquare to prioritize its roadmap and optimize customer journeys

The company

MillerKnoll is a global collective of iconic furniture design brands, including Herman Miller, Knoll, Design Within Reach (DWR), HAY, and Holly Hunt. The company was formed in 2021 when Herman Miller merged with Knoll, 2 iconic office and furniture design brands. All MillerKnoll brands are unified by the belief that good design solves problems and creates a better world. 

John Stratford, SVP Global Ecommerce at MillerKnoll, and his team oversee the digital customer experience and dedicate their time to improving the ‘consideration’ phase of the customer journey. John says their customers often visit approximately 12 times before making a purchase.

“The products we sell are not impulsively purchased, so the evolution of the customer is largely about where they are in that consideration space,” he says. 

The challenge

In the MillerKnoll model, a lot of information was given upfront to help the customer make a purchase decision. But John says that what that information was, when customers got introduced to it, and where it was at a product-page level, was difficult to determine. 

“When you think about, say, a sofa product page, there’s a ton of information—the size, material, the designer behind it. There’s a lot of information to take in besides ‘How would this look in my house?’” John says.

“All that information together is important to the purchase, but it needs to be in the order the customer wants it, what they’re looking for specifically, the findability of it. That’s all really critical to the journey.”

His team was relying on Google Analytics, which gave them ‘data on the surface.’ They had to make assumptions about what metrics meant within the broader picture, and then guess at next steps. “The tools we were using were largely about point-in-time measurements across any page or page groups. The information we really needed was how those things came together,” says John.

Having worked with Contentsquare in a previous role and knowing the benefits of experience intelligence, John and his team turned to the platform to connect the dots and unlock the ‘why’ behind customer behavior

Furniture is not an impulsive purchase. Customers take time to consider what they are buying and why over many sessions. Contentsquare provided the visibility into that full view of the customer, from page to page, and that was a big unlock for us.

John Stratford

SVP Global Ecommerce

The solution

With Contentsquare, now John and his team can validate the biggest opportunities in the customer journey, according to business impact and critical KPIs. 

Here are 3 ways Contentsquare has empowered John’s team to better understand the customer experience and gain confidence in setting out a data-backed prioritization roadmap to make meaningful, business-driven actions.

1. Improving navigation clarity

John says there are several ways you can group and filter furniture, which makes site navigation difficult to order and creates a busy user interface.

“When you think about the ways you can navigate the site, there’s a ton of different ways you can slice and dice that,” he says.

We're intending to serve the customer in the best way, getting them to the next click, to the next page, or the information that they need to confidently build a basket. And Contentsquare gives us a really clean view across all those pages.

John Stratford

SVP Global Ecommerce

John and his team were able to see exactly how users interacted with navigation elements on their pages with the zone-based heatmaps, which provides a visual breakdown of customer interactions, from clicks, hovers, and scrolls at the page level. 

“We were able to assess the elements and options that were driving the highest level of engagement and then what the outcomes were of those clicks on the navigation,” he says. “We’ve since done work refactoring our navigation groups, what appears and what doesn’t, based on this customer data.”

2. Redesigning product pages

The next big item on the customer experience checklist was product pages. With Contentsquare, the team no longer needed to guess about content placement or the order of information presented. 

The team also used zone-based heatmaps to check each content block on their product pages, including the configurator feature—a crucial step customers take when building a piece of furniture—looking at the attractiveness rate of each block to determine where it should sit on the page (or if it needed to be optimized or removed).  

The team also used Zone-based heatmaps to determine which modules, from video to imagery and copy, were driving the most engagement—a key metric in the customer’s consideration journey. “We got some pretty clear signals and opportunities for cleaning up the product page and creating a better end solution,” John says.

“We looked at areas where there were no clicks, no engagement, and eliminated some of that content. We came up with a better, more concise version of the product page that, overall, led to higher engagement and a higher add-to-cart rate.”

The results

John says the enhancements they made using Contentsquare’s insights and A/B testing have resulted in improvements to add-to-cart rates, time on site, and bounce rates.

Contentsquare has been a game-changer for us. Just looking at basic reporting and stats is not a way to run a modern business in a digital space. You really need a deeper understanding of your customer, and Contentsquare provides that.

John Stratford

SVP Global Ecommerce

John highlights 3 areas where his team has really benefited from using Contentsquare:

1. Actionable insight: “The team collectively has another level of insights they go to for answering business questions, which gives a better result based on customer outcomes we’re able to derive from. Instead of single-page reporting or KPIs, they’re able to see a kind of end-to-end view and more actionable insights.”

2. Optimized A/B testing: “It’s really changed the way we think about A/B testing and the things we now have line of sight to other than just a straight testing methodology. We can quantify the A/B tests and see what happens in sessions with our customers way deeper than just a report.”

3. Improved roadmap: “We have a much more quantifiable roadmap and can model out what the business impact will be to certain decisions.”

With Contentsquare, John and his team can now also determine the scope and timing of workloads, tackling opportunities and optimizations with the most business impact. “We use Contentsquare to help with the prioritization of work. The information we get from the platform helps us size opportunities and determine what’s next in line,” John says.

His team makes data-based decisions on future changes to their customer journeys or product pages by tapping into Contentsquare’s Experience Analytics suite to get a 360-degree view of their customers. 

They segment users into key cohorts and apply these segments as a filter to journeys and session replays to find friction points or unexpected behaviors. Knowing what their high-value users do on-site enables John and his team to find new ways to shift more users into those key journeys.

With Impact Quantification, the team now makes decisions on what opportunities to act on first in terms of business impact and then A/B tests their hypotheses, using Contentsquare to understand why one variant performed better than another.

“We can test, validate, prove, and quantify net value, all in real time,” John says. “Then, in advance, we can actually get a better understanding of the sizing of those opportunities and therefore place those things in the right order of operation. 

“We use Contentsquare for determining what’s next in our roadmap,

What’s next

Given the average time it takes for customers to purchase, the team at MillerKnoll is excited to start using Contentsquare’s User Lifecycle Extension to track user behavior across multiple sessions and devices. “We’ve recently begun using the User Lifecycle Extension to help us with deeper insights around bounce rate,” John says.

“Traditionally, you look at visits to your site: who stays or who leaves on entry. But we’ve gone deeper on that, looking at those who bounced and came back vs. those who bounced and didn’t come back."

His team’s also looking into how Data Connect, a Contentsquare capability that automatically exports user behavior data into your data warehouse of choice, can help them leverage their data across their tech stack. 

“As we continue to evolve how we serve the customer, we look forward to additional collaboration with Contentsquare.”