Multi-channel customer analysis leads to better conversion

The explosion of tablet and smartphone usage in recent years has not only revolutionised the way we shop, but has increased the need for speed in data analysis.

Challenge

In order to enhance and extend the reach of its offering, a leading retailer introduced a brand new iPad app. Having launched the new app, the business needed to validate its initial design choices and to quickly gather information on how the app was being used. This would enable them to make specific modifications that would guarantee the best consumer experience and the highest levels of engagement.

Eager to isolate and act on any areas for improvement, the business was keen to understand how the new app’s functionality was impacting customer behaviour. The challenge was to gather all the intelligence required to make such enhancements, quickly, to ensure that the project could advance in the most cost-effective manner and the new app could be improved immediately.

Since this was a new app on a new platform, the company was also keen to identify first-time customers, but more importantly to locate those transitioning from other platforms. They needed to ascertain if this migration was creating new business or simply cannibalising existing traffic.

Solution

Station10 was engaged to collate, evaluate and deliver all the necessary information required to make essential design and development decisions. By extracting and combining the company’s individual datasets (for each platform) and working closely with the product managers to identify key functional points of difference between the new app and previous platforms, we were able to explain how the new app’s functionality was impacting customer behaviour.

From this, we built a complete multi-channel view of customers that were using the app, and isolated cohorts of similar users, to determine if and how their behaviours changed when they transitioned to the new app. The analysis also established whether those changes were positive or negative, in order to determine if any modifications needed to be made.

The rapidly evolving retail sector demands that app developments and improvements be made fast if they are to be effective. This means that the insights required to make such decisions need to be accessed immediately.

To offer the retailer this vital intelligence in a short space of time, our analysis was carried out over the course of two fortnight-long sprints. Interim findings were presented back to the stakeholders on a regular basis, and a final presentation was distributed at the end. This meant that decision-makers could begin to think about improvements straight away and the project could move swiftly forward to deliver maximum ROI.

Business Benefits

The unified cross-channel consumer view that emerged from the two-week-long insight sprints, gave the retailer a clear understanding of who was engaging with the new app – and in what ways. This equipped the retailer with a better understanding of its consumer and of his or her needs, and provided the following business benefits:

• More informed decision making
• Pertinent questions resolved
• Identification of issues and opportunities around engagement, revealing modifications that could be made to encourage conversion
• Improvements specifically targeted to consumer needs
• Identification of users with abandoned baskets for the purpose of retargeting via marketing
• Validation of the new app’s effectiveness leading to its deployment across other platforms