“With MetaRouter, we found that we could map every part of the customer journey once and link to all of the different data streams we needed. Everyone in the company uses it, sometimes without even realizing it.” -Dave Matthes, Senior Leader of Customer Communication
Many mechanics, repairpersons, trade professionals, inventors, and other project-lovers rely on Princess Auto for the tools and equipment they need. It’s no wonder. Princess Auto promises, "No sale is final until you’re satisfied," which means they’ll repair, replace, or refund any product.
In other words, this family-owned company cares deeply about their customer experience.
Princess Auto’s Challenge
“We’re not a tech company, we’re a retail company that’s focused on the digital side of the customer experience,” explains Dave Matthes, Princess Auto’s Senior Leader of Customer Communication. Though Princess Auto has 48 thriving storefronts across every province in Canada, they also provide a robust e-comm service.
Providing a customer experience that crosses channels matters to the company. And they’ve found that emphasizing the digital side drives excellence on the physical side.
A huge priority, then, was analyzing customer data. They had several tools they relied on—like Hotjar, Facebook ads, and Google Analytics—but each one was adding data layers to the site and required adding new browser tags to implement.
“Initially we looked at adding Google Tag Manager, but we wanted to do more in-depth analysis,” says Dave. While looking for alternative solutions, Princess Auto discovered MetaRouter.
The MetaRouter Solution
“With MetaRouter, we found that we could map every part of the customer journey once and link to all of the different data streams we needed,” says Dave, “which is important, because all of us, no matter our role, see creation of a great digital experience as a core part of our jobs.”
With only one snippet of code, Princess Auto hooked up mobile and web sources and set up exactly which events they wanted to track. Then, within the MetaRouter dashboard, they turned on the destinations—Hotjar, Facebook ads and Google Analytics, etc—and immediately saw data flowing.
The easy point-and-click nature of MetaRouter’s library has saved significant developer resources for Princess Auto. Every team has access to their own user-friendly dashboard, which enables them to point-and-click to choose individual tools they want to use—and focus on their conversion goals instead of setup.
“I think MetaRouter has more horsepower than we use,” says Dave, “but we know that as we grow, MetaRouter has the infrastructure in place to support that. We have already done some major overhauls to the UX and customer experience, and MetaRouter kept tracking data the whole time without interruption.”
With MetaRouter, they’ve been able to truly understand how users are traversing their site, which has led to both digital and physical customer experience breakthroughs.
Princess Auto’s Outcome
One of the greatest benefits has been the way using digital tools freely has shaped the internal mindset. Because any team can A-B test digitally with ease, employees began to see little changes impact conversion rates.
Now, teams constantly talk about versioning and think critically about how to be better not just online, but also in print, circulation, and anywhere else. “The catalyst to this change in attitude has been having the toolsets to change, record, analyze and predict,” says Dave. “We’ve brought this digital mindset into physical channels, too.”
As MetaRouter enables more and more experiments, Princess Auto sees more and more benefits. “For us, MetaRouter is a little ‘set it and forget it’,” says Dave. “Everyone uses it without even realizing it. It’s a part of our ecosystem, ingrained in everything we do. It’s almost so good it’s invincible.”
Always focused on making the customer experience better, Princess Auto has yet another platform change coming soon—one that will allow them to optimize their digital business even better.
Normally, it would be difficult to migrate the tools and event tracking. But not with MetaRouter. “We can continue to run MetaRouter during all these changes,” says Dave, “and keep tracking every event we need for analysis.”
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