How Sonepar used Contentsquare to increase platform adoption rate by over +300%

The company

Sonepar is the global leader in B2B distribution of electrical products, solutions, and related services, operating through 90 brands across 40 countries with 46,000 associates.

Since 1969, Sonepar has continued to grow and adapt to meet the evolving needs of its customers. Today, it’s working to become the first global B2B electrical distributor to offer a fully digital and seamless omnichannel experience.

The challenge

Creating a seamless experience across all customer touchpoints is a top priority for Sonepar. But turning that vision into reality is no small feat, especially for a company that supports electricians in 40 countries across a mix of devices and platforms every single day. 

A typical day for a customer might start with picking up materials at a branch, checking a quote on the app around midday, then placing an order from home through the website later that night. 

This journey spans multiple touchpoints, but the experience often felt disconnected. That’s because, like many enterprise companies, Sonepar’s digital operations had grown in silos.

At the same time, Sonepar wanted to make faster, smarter decisions across the business. With one of the largest customer behavior datasets in the industry, the team saw an opportunity to move away from gut instinct and start using real, data-driven insights to guide optimization decisions.

To bring this vision to life, Olivier Thivent, SVP Omnichannel Experience and Business Process Transformation at Sonepar, turned to Contentsquare to better understand customer behavior at every touchpoint and lay the foundation for a truly connected and seamless experience across all of Sonepar’s channels.

Our main challenge was to create a true omnichannel experience, where installers would feel recognized and supported no matter how they interacted with us. As a sales organization, gut instinct has always been important in how we work, but we want to shift more toward making decisions based on real data. That’s also where Contentsquare is helping us move forward.

Olivier Thivent

SVP Omnichannel Experience and Business Process Transformation

The solution

To fix the disconnect across its digital and physical touchpoints, Sonepar needed more than dashboards and high-level reports. 

The team wanted to understand exactly how customers were interacting with each channel and why, so they could identify friction points, surface opportunities, and improve the experience using real behavioral data.

Olivier began by using Contentsquare’s experience intelligence platform to dig deeper into how electricians interacted across their digital and physical spaces. His team focused on uncovering the real reasons behind customer actions: why visitors engaged, converted, or dropped off.

Here are 3 ways Sonepar is using Contentsquare to streamline the customer journey, close experience gaps across channels, and help more teams make smarter, faster decisions.

Step 1: analyze customer behavior across touchpoints to uncover friction points

Before Contentsquare, Sonepar relied heavily on dashboards to track surface-level metrics, such as the number of customers who visited or completed a purchase. 

However, these traditional reports couldn’t explain the reasons behind customer behavior, specifically why users dropped off during a transaction, engaged with certain pages and not others, or chose to return and repurchase.

Contentsquare’s experience intelligence platform gave the team visibility into how customers moved across different digital touchpoints. They could see both positive behavior signals and friction points, such as:

• What visitors were looking for

• Why they engaged and purchased

• Why they dropped off

With these deeper insights, Sonepar’s customer-facing teams could now better understand customer needs, prioritize improvements that mattered most to users, and build a more intuitive and user-friendly omnichannel experience.

Step 2: use behavior insights to analyze A/B test results and optimize key features

Sonepar’s product management (PM) and user experience (UX) teams used Contentsquare to validate hypotheses with real-time behavioral data and analyze A/B tests.

For example, Sonepar wanted to improve its ‘Already Purchased’ feature for returning electricians to make repeat purchasing faster and more convenient. 

The team conducted A/B experiments to test different designs and determine which version delivered the best user experience. Initial results showed that one design led to a drop in conversions, signaling something in the flow was disrupting the customer journey. While A/B test results showed what was happening, the results didn’t explain why.

By analyzing user behavior with Contentsquare, the team discovered the feature’s positioning felt intrusive and interrupted the natural flow. They redesigned the experience to make the feature more intuitive and easier to access.

This improvement made it simpler for returning customers to pick up where they left off—an important step toward delivering a more consistent and connected repeat-purchase experience across Sonepar’s digital channels.

Step 3: expand access to real-time insights across teams

Initially, only Sonepar’s PM and UX teams benefited from Contentsquare, using it to monitor customer journeys and spot friction points. But it quickly became clear that real-time behavioral insights could benefit many more teams across the organization.

Building on these early successes, Sonepar is now expanding Contentsquare adoption to include category managers and marketing teams.

The goal is to embed customer insights deeper into daily decision-making processes and move the entire organization toward a more data-driven, customer-centric culture.

Olivier says features like CS Live can be especially helpful for marketing teams. Instead of waiting for traditional reporting cycles, marketing managers can easily see how their content is performing in real time and adjust campaigns or assets on the go.

With faster access to behavior data, teams can make smarter decisions, whether that’s optimizing product pages, refining promotional strategies, or improving category navigation. While adoption is still growing within the company, more teams across Sonepar are starting to use Contentsquare to drive better outcomes.

The results

Since using Contentsquare, Sonepar has made faster, more data-driven decisions and is seeing early gains in customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Sonepar’s success metrics:

• Platform adoption increased by over +300%, and the number of active users grew by +44%

• Decision-making became faster and more data-driven, helping teams prioritize roadmap initiatives based on real user insights rather than gut feelings or internal debate

• Customer satisfaction and loyalty also improved, with a rise in Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) over the past several months

More teams across the organization are now using Contentsquare, signaling a cultural shift toward embedding data-driven insights into their operations. 

Looking ahead, Sonepar plans to deepen its use of Contentsquare to deliver a truly seamless experience across every touchpoint.

Personalization is a big focus for us. Our goal is to deliver the best recommendations, solutions, and products for each customer, so they always feel supported with exactly what they need. And Contentsquare gives us the depth of insights we need to deliver truly personalized experiences at the level of a segment of one.

Olivier Thivent

SVP Omnichannel Experience and Business Process Transformation