How Royal Caribbean International used Contentsquare to boost mobile conversions by +4%

Key metrics

The company

Royal Caribbean International is known for driving innovation at sea and has continuously redefined cruise vacationing since its launch in 1969. Royal Caribbean currently sails to over 300 destinations and has a total of 24 ships with more on the way. 

Over the years, Royal Caribbean has continuously evolved to enhance its guest experience, onboard the ship and on its digital platforms.

Royal Caribbean website

The challenge

Royal Caribbean wanted to enhance its digital experience to empower customers to self-serve online, reduce reliance on costly travel agencies, and drive more direct bookings. Put simply, the company wanted to increase customer acquisition through its owned digital platforms, across desktop and mobile. 

However, its digital experience was falling short of expectations, particularly while booking online. Customers were experiencing slow page loads and friction during the booking process. 

To solve this, Jessica Dewing, Senior Product Manager at Royal Caribbean, and her team turned to Contentsquare to better understand their customer’s digital behavior and identify actionable insights to enhance their web and mobile guest journeys.

As an avid user of Contentsquare in her previous roles, Jessica was determined to help her team unlock the platform's full potential for gaining valuable insights. She took the initiative to collaborate with her colleagues, organizing training sessions to ensure everyone could effectively leverage Contentsquare’s capabilities.

I was thrilled to find out that Royal Caribbean had Contentsquare because, honestly, I can't do my job effectively without it—at least not at the level I was used to. But when I got there, I quickly realized that no one [in product] was really using the tool. They saw it as just an analytics tool. I had to explain that its purpose is to allow non-analysts to use data to make decisions.

Jessica Dewing

Senior Product Manager at Royal Caribbean

The solution

Jessica's team began by analyzing their guest booking experience across mobile and desktop using Contentsquare's Experience Analytics product. 

Following these 3 key steps, they quickly uncovered issues in their checkout page and made improvements based on Contentsquare data insights. 

Step 1: segment customers based on their interaction

The team had recently introduced an autofill feature for logged-in customers on the guest information section of their checkout page. The idea was that if customers logged in, their personal details, such as their name and address, would be automatically filled in, making the checkout process smoother and faster. 

The autofill feature was expected to boost conversion rates, but it had the opposite effect: conversion rates were down, specifically on mobile. This was especially surprising, as pre-populating form fields is a common feature for mobile.

To understand the reason for this drop, the team used Contentsquare to analyze mobile customer behavior. They segmented mobile customers into 2 groups: those who clicked on the log-in banner and those who didn’t. This revealed that those who didn’t engage with the banner (which was the majority of traffic to mobile) had higher exit rates.

Step 2: understanding the why and uncovering friction

To understand why this segment of users exited at higher rates and uncover the exact points of friction in the guest journey, the team used Contentsquare's Heatmaps capability.

Heatmaps helped the team understand which areas of the page were receiving attention and which were being ignored.

Heatmap analysis revealed that the mobile log-in component consumed a significant amount of space, pushing critical input fields out of view. As a result, guests couldn’t see the input fields to fill in the required information and finish their checkout journey.

Every chance I get, I remind people, "We have an issue? Go look at the data in Contentsquare! We can check the errors, quantify them, and prioritize based on that." We can go and find the specific session in session replay, watch it, reproduce it, and see exactly what the customer experienced step by step. There's just so much value.

Jessica Dewing

Senior Product Manager at Royal Caribbean

Step 3: redesign the log-in banner and run A/B tests to see how changes resonate with customers

Based on their findings, Jessica and her team collaborated with their designers to revamp the banner, reducing it from a larger block of information to a single sentence. The goal was to make the banner less visually prominent while encouraging customers to log in easily.

Then, the team conducted an A/B test to compare customer behavior with the original banner and the redesigned banner, integrating Contentsquare with their A/B testing tool. The optimized banner had a significantly better outcome: a +4% increase in mobile conversion rates. 

This result validated their hypothesis that the user interface (UI) was creating friction, and reducing the amount of space dedicated to this feature removed a major obstacle from the mobile experience.

The results

These data-driven changes have significantly improved Royal Caribbean’s mobile customer experience and overall booking journey, helping them achieve key success metrics. 

Deeper insight into customer behavior has also helped the company move customers to self-service channels, reducing reliance on costly call centers, while enhancing the digital guest experience. 

Royal Caribbean’s success metrics: 

• Increased mobile conversion rate by +4% after optimizing the log-in banner

• Reduced bounce and abandonment rates by improving the mobile checkout process

• Enhanced user experience and customer satisfaction by resolving UI issues

Solve for real customer problems. The more we can be laser-focused on what the real customer problems are, and build solutions that address those real problems, that’s how we’re going to move the needle.

Jessica Dewing

Senior Product Manager at Royal Caribbean