Customer success story: How Honolulu Cookie Company built a successful business based on customer feedback
By collecting precious feedback from its customers, Honolulu Cookie Company has been able to identify their customers’ needs and improve the digital experience of their e-commerce website. This way, the company is now able to share the spirit of Aloha with world-class experiences, online as much as in stores.
Honolulu Cookie Company is a food and gifting company based in Hawaii. Since its establishment in 1998, the company has been well-known for its signature shortbread cookies and the company has now opened 18 stores and entered the international market, bringing the cookies to other countries such as Japan and Korea.
In 2008, the company also opened its doors to e-commerce, allowing customers to purchase the delicious cookies on their website.
Honolulu Cookie Company’s online vision has always been to offer an experience that matches the friendly and personal service offered to the customers in their stores. Not only is this an integral part of the Honolulu Cookie Company DNA, but also a sound business practice. When experiencing a personal and professional service, 40% of customers are more likely to buy more and put more products in the basket.
“We want to share the spirit of Aloha with world-class products and experiences, online as much as in stores”, says Lisa Bankston, eCommerce & Customer Service Leader at Honolulu Cookie Company.
The challenge
To better understand their users’ perception and thoughts about their online service, Honolulu Cookie Company recognized the need for collecting customer feedback and insights.
Their goal was to get insights about how their customers perceived the quality of the service on their website and in which specific areas they needed to improve.
For this reason, Honolulu Cookie Company realized that it had to identify issues and gather as much data as possible about their users, their online behaviour and needs. This to be able to lean towards their customers and shape the website features according to the feedback and data collected.
The solution
Honolulu Cookie Company chose to use UserReport because “it is an effective online survey tool, very quick to implement on any website and with a very easy to read report interface”, as Lisa Bankston describes it.
By asking specific questions with the UserReport online survey, Honolulu Cookie Company managed to collect data about their customers’ satisfaction towards both the service and the website usability. What’s more, thanks to the Feedback Forum tool offered with UserReport, the users had the opportunity of giving feedback and report problems.
With this, the marketing team was able to present to the board the results from both the survey and the feedback forum readily available in fully customizable reports.
“People trust personal data coming from real people, especially when they’re validated by an external third-party provider. The data we collected worked as a “testimonial” to convince colleagues to take executive decisions”, says Lisa Bankston.
The outcome
With the insights from UserReport, Honolulu Cookie Company was able to discover and address three key areas:
- The company found out how to optimize the checkout at the end of the purchase funnel – a very delicate stage they had tried to structure in a better way for a long time.
- The company discovered that several customers demanded to use the same reward card used in stores (the Aloha card) also for online purchases, where the Pineapple reward system was in use instead.
- From a branding perspective, the company understood that customers perceived them as a gifting company, hence they expected greeting cards and the possibility to send cookies to different locations.
The marketing team saw the need to build a brand new interface in 2019 in order to address these issues.
Thanks to the insights gained, the company is now building the new website with much more awareness of their customers’ needs.
Honolulu Cookie Company intends to implement the new interface in 2019 and closely monitor it with the help of UserReport. Among other things, they will use the customer satisfaction level from the previous website as a useful benchmark to validate the success of the new interface.
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