Background

Symphony is the UK’s largest privately owned manufacturer of fitted kitchen, fitted bedroom and fitted bathroom furniture with a turnover exceeding £220 million and over 1500 employees.

Symphony is a business to business supplier of kitchens to independent retailers, merchants and  housing developers.

Symphony offers a selection of a number of brands to retailers including the Laura Ashley Kitchen Collection, Gallery, Linear, Aquadi and Urbano, plus first rate service to provide the Symphony independent retailer with all the tools to succeed.

The only thing Symphony hasn’t historically done for retailers, is generate leads for their stores. This was about to change as described by the task below.

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The Task

Symphony had an existing website but its original purpose was to serve only independent retailers and other B2B enquiries.

The Sculpt task as set by Symphony, was how to generate more direct consumer enquiries from the website, which could then be forwarded to dealers to follow up. Dealer research had identified lead generation as a service dealers would value highly, if it could be provided by Symphony

Sculpt Analysis

Given that the task was to generate more consumer enquiries, Sculpt’s approach was to benchmark the present volumes of site traffic, the SEO performance and the site’s UX and content with reference to satisfying a consumer, rather than trade enquiry.

Sculpt’s analysis identified a number of issues to be addressed;

Firstly, organic performance was poor. If consumer traffic was to increase, this would need to improve.

Secondly, analytics revealed that performance of some of the key pages was poor. Content  and UX improvements would be required to ensure the site made sense and was of value to a new consumer audience.

Thirdly, there were consumer fulfilment issues in terms of accessing the brochures for the various ranges and also the ability to identify which ranges were stocked by the respective retailers.

Fourthly, analytics revealed that the majority of traffic came from mobile, with the existing site experience being particularly poor on mobile.

Sculpt Recommendations

Data driven UX improvements

Clearly there was work to be done but the legacy site represented an impediment. The site was housed on a legacy and outdated .NET CMS platform.

Sculpt’s first recommendation was the site should be migrated to WordPress to better facilitate the technical changes required.  Sculpt was subsequently able to scope, design, migrate data, develop and deploy the new website, platform and SEO improvements in just 14 weeks.

The legacy website was scraped using Sculpt’s in-house content scraper thereby avoiding the requirement to parse the legacy .NET database which had several inherent issues. Data was seamlessly imported into WordPress. A full audit of URL’s receiving traffic and attracting links was conducted and where possible the existing content hierarchy and URL’s remained the same. Where relevant, a 1:1 301 redirect strategy was in place to map old url’s to the exact location of the new content.

All crawl issues such as duplicate content, url’s resolving on both www and non-www, https and http were addressed to give the website a boost in crawl efficiency.

The change in CMS platform to WordPress as well as addressing SEO issues also helped facilitate the Content and UX changes required.

These included the creation of a differentiated experience for each of the individual Symphony brands. The brand “looks” featured in the brochure now appeared on the website. Sculpt also introduced the facility to feature each of the individual brochures for each brand and also the ability to identify which retailers stocked the brand in which a consumer was interested.

In addition, Sculpt is about to introduce a management tool for Symphony to capture details of every brochure request and subsequent action. This will ensure that no lead was ever lost.       

Results

This work has only recently been completed but already the benefits are clear.

Over 5,000 crawl issues were addressed during the replatforming which has generated an immediate 7% increase in organic search traffic.

This has in turn brought in over 2,000 new consumer enquiries. If you consider that the average purchase price of a Symphony kitchen is over £12,000, it will take only a fraction of these enquiries to convert to sale, to generate a very positive ROI.

In addition, the new lead generation capabilities of the site is generating very positive goodwill amongst Symphony’s independent kitchen retailer customer base.

UX Improvements

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