SALMON ENHANCE HALFORDS ONLINE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE - UNVEILING THEIR NEW DIGITAL PLATFORM FOR THE FUTURE.
Halfords is the UK's leading retailer for automotive leisure and cycling products with over 460 retail stores throughout the UK and Ireland. They also have an auto centre garage business that has over 300 outlets in the UK.
Halfords continually look for ways to make it easier and more enjoyable for customers to shop with them, working with Salmon to optimise the Halfords shopping experience across store, web and mobile. With the customer at the heart of every Halfords project, in 2013, Halfords asked Salmon to help enhance their overall customer proposition, creating them a new platform for the future that would drive growth online and to its portfolio of more than 460 stores nationwide. One of the key strategic objective was adding additional content, video and how to guides.
A huge year of development began for Salmon, in less than six months Salmon implemented Halfords new redesign across the .com and .ie websites, plus mobile and tablet optimised sites.
Salmon implemented a new search engine using Fred Hopper and launched a major range extension programme in cycle, parts, clothing and accessories. This was followed by a full re-launch of the click and collect proposition a fundamental overhaul of the structure of the website and the replatform of their auto centre online business to WebSphere Commerce.
More and more of Halfords customers are now using the site as part of their purchasing trip, with the improvements increasing the ease and enjoyment of shopping.
The new site was delivered on time and on budget and since the changes were made Halfords have seen real tangible benefits and improvements including a 15% uplift in customer conversion, which was the primary measure of success, they have had 1.5 million viewings of the video content added to the site and their customer satisfaction score for click and collect has risen significantly.
Salmon and Halfords have enjoyed industry recognition for the project, winning the 2014 Online Retail Award in the cars, bikes and accessories category.
"It's been a hugely successful project, we've made a huge amount of change and sometimes it's difficult to assess each individual piece of work, but if I look at our customer engagement our customer feedback and our customer conversion, we've absolutely made the step change in our performance that we set out to do."
- Clive West, Digital Director for Halfords