Gallaghers Case Study

Falling in love with customer insights to drive growth

The Problem/ Challenge/ Opportunity 

I joined Gallaghers long before setting up Runway Consulting and initially joined them as an E-Commerce Consultant before becoming Head of E-Commerce. The business had been on a huge acquisition spree, purchasing a variety of consumer insurance brands. As part of a wider team we were responsible for bringing them into the Gallagher family, whilst helping them improve their online revenue. 

So the challenge was how could we help support a variety of brands with different systems to drive online revenue?

Our Approach

While I was still a consultant, the Head of E-Commerce came up with the brilliant idea to build a website that could build websites helping us to replicate websites for these different brands. 

My remit was clear: ensure that when we rolled these websites out, each performed well from day one in terms of improved web conversion and revenue.  

To do this, we went and recruited some highly skilled agencies to support us, including an Insights, UX, and dev agency. The Insights agency was tasked with highlighting the problems with the current website and the UX agency and was asked to look at developing better solutions. 

What was observed and experienced

The research we conducted involved web user testing and in-depth 1-2-1 interviews. This not only involved having real customers and prospects review the current websites via trained moderators but we also had these same individuals undertake tasks on the top UK insurance websites so we could highlight the elements that aid and hinder web visitors. 

From this, we collected a huge amount of data not purely on web journeys but right down to specific questions on home insurance websites so we could understand the right functionality for each type of question, language and so on. It is a process that is hugely important as just presenting one question in a way people would not understand can cause huge drop offs and see high levels of lost revenue. 

The UX team then took this information and was able to develop much-improved solutions at a journey, page, and question level.  

The Results

The first website we rolled out witnessed its web conversion improve from 6% to 22% overnight, a factor that reduced the CPS by 4 times and then allowed more traffic to be pumped into the brand to increase sales. This is when I witnessed the real power of spending relatively small amounts to gather real customer insights to guide the marketing process. It is a process I stand by to this day as the right way to go about getting the most from your marketing activity be it on or offline. Customer insights of this nature will tell you the real problems to be solved and highlight the solutions to resolve them. 

All the best

Lee @ Runway Consulting