HARRODS X CONTENTSQUARE

How advanced customer behavior data helped Harrods reduce cart abandonment by -8%

The company

Harrods is a luxury department store that first opened its doors in 1849 in Knightsbridge, London. In recent years, Harrods has focused strongly on its digital evolution and optimizing their online shopping experience.

Amid the pandemic, Harrods focused their harrods.com service to ensure customers received the same standard of excellence online as they would in-store. With the store closed due to restrictions, the site became the most important touchpoint for Harrods and its customers. “With the impact of lockdown, we were seeing more traffic on the website,” explains Nick. “We needed to ensure the site had fewer pain points and limited customer friction.”

To get a solid understanding of how the new site was performing and ensure a frictionless customer experience, Digital Analytics Manager Nick Clews and the digital team turned to the Contentsquare Digital Experience Intelligence platform for help.

Key Metrics

+8% reduction in cart abandonment

-50% decrease in rage clicks

The challenge

The team’s two main challenges were surfacing customer pain points and understanding which optimizations to prioritize for the biggest impact. Before using our platform, Harrods was using Google Analytics to monitor site performance. But with limited resources, they needed a tool that would help streamline journey analysis, automate error monitoring, and provide the wider digital team with visual and easy-to-understand insights into customer behavior.

“Contentsquare made that experience a whole lot more manageable for me and the collective digital team,” explains Nick.

The solution

Analysis showed that over 7,000 desktop visits were impacted by this issue. Using Session Replay, Nick noticed that the segment of customers that were rage clicking were also encountering a vague error message: “Please enter a valid first name”. Customers were inputting special characters or multiple names, not understanding what was causing the issue.

Armed with this insight, the UX team revisited the wording to provide a more specific error message: “Please enter a first name using character A-Z, - and ‘ “.

The team used Frustration Scoring to surface issues and then Session Replay to better understand the why behind these errors, Nick was able to immediately optimize the new site checkout journey in three ways:

1. Reducing Friction at Checkout

One of the first insights flagged was an error in the checkout form causing customers to click in the “First name” field multiple times.

Before
After

2. Optimizing the delivery page

Next, our Error Analysis capability detected a slow load time in the “Click & Collect” option of the delivery page—an important new service provided by Harrods. This slow load time was causing customers to rage-click on the delivery option.

This helped identify and quantify the issue. And by sharing real-life examples of user sessions with the IT team, they were able to take quick action and optimize the page to improve the time that it took users to complete the click-and-collect form by 10% and reduce form abandonment by -2%.

On closer inspection, Nick realised that an error message was being shown above the fold where customers couldn’t see it, causing them to continually click the button despite having entered incorrect details. Approximately 1,000 monthly conversions were lost as a result of customers not knowing an error had arisen.

With this insight, the UX team was notified and able to fix the issue promptly. “It’s invaluable being able to see interactions and uncover pain points; automatically bringing errors to our attention makes our lives and improving the site so much easier,” says Nick.

3. Highlighting errors on the payment page

Finally, our AI capability surfaced an issue in the last step of the checkout journey on the "Place order" call to action (CTA). Our platform revealed that customers were trying to place their order by clicking “Pay Now” but were getting stuck.

To find out why this was happening, Nick took a closer look in Session Replay which revealed customers struggling to enter their card details. Analysis showed that in some sessions, customers were clicking the card icon repeatedly, presumably expecting to have to select a card provider.

We couldn’t have made all the improvements we’ve made without a tool like Contentsquare. We’ve made it available to different teams across the organization; for example, the content team can jump in and use the browser extension to understand page performance and make on-the-fly changes."

Nick Clews

Digital Analytics Manager, Harrods

The results

Thanks to these insights, Nick and the digital team at Harrods were able to streamline and improve the entire website’s customer journey. As a result, the checkout pages saw an increase in conversion rate, as well as a decline in cart abandonment and rage clicks.

The checkout form had a -50% decrease in rage clicks, with the percentage of multiple clicks in the "First Name" field dropping from 16% to 8% in just over 2 months. Overall, improvements to the checkout journey reduced cart abandonment by -8%.

Moreover, our platform has not only been valuable for Nick’s team, but for others in different teams across the business—such as the UX designers, Content Managers, Product Owners, and the Trade Team.

Contentsquare enables different teams and users at Harrods to build customer experience analysis into their day-to-day life. It's now a fundamental part of our site analysis and I can't imagine moving to a company that doesn't have a tool like Contentsquare. It’s a tool that I couldn’t live without anymore."

Nick Clews

Digital Analytics Manager, Harrods

“As our digital presence grows, we look forward to building our relationship and using more Contentsquare features to support us on our journey."
Nick Clews, Digital Analytics Manager at Harrods

What's next

In the next year, Harrods will be relaunching its app which serves as an in-store guide helping customers navigate through the store.

Our platform will play a pivotal role in ensuring a seamless omnichannel experience across all of Harrod’s digital channels. Using our platform, Harrods will be able to optimize and gather insights across the entire digital journey—from online on the website, to offline when customers use the app in-store.

Harrods will also be implementing more of our Digital Experience Monitoring features that allow technical teams to create seamless experiences for customers by removing friction points and slow performance.