Designed for travellers by travellers – Away is an American luggage and travel accessories brand. Their mission? To transform travel and inspire people to get away more because they believe that the more everyone travels, the better we all become. This mission informs everything Away does – from the innovative products they offer to their online shopping experience.
Away originally launched as an online Direct-To-Customer (DTC) business and its ecommerce storefront remains a crucial channel for Away today. In addition to Away’s social media and the products themselves, the site is the primary digital channel used for interacting with current and potential customers firsthand.
While Away regularly engages with customers on social media platforms following their purchases, the team made the realisation that these insights weren’t enough. They lacked insights into the shopping process itself; a gap which led them to Mopinion.
Ben Schweitzer, Director of User Experience at Away, works closely with Away’s Product, Marketing and Engineering teams to ensure Away provides the best possible shopping experience to its customers. An important part of achieving that goal is listening to their customers. This is why Ben has agreed to share some exclusive insights into how their digital feedback programme plays into creating the optimal online shopping experience.
Recognising a gap in insights
Away’s ability to interact and listen to its customers is what makes the brand so successful. They are committed to offering products that respond to real travel pain points. And that wouldn’t be possible without the help of its highly-engaged community.
Ben shares: “Prior to implementing Mopinion, we were engaging with our customers across our social media channels following their purchases, but we recognised a gap in that we were not collecting feedback during the shopping process.”
We weren’t aware of how we could advise shoppers to make the best and easiest purchase decisions and what information would be the most useful to them at various stages of their shopping process. In order to fill this gap, we sought out an easy and efficient solution to give shoppers the opportunity to provide feedback along the way. This removes purchasing barriers and solves problems in real-time.
Ben Schweitzer, Director of User Experience
Despite conducting user testing on the site and with various features, Away couldn’t be certain that there were no undiscovered issues or any customer inquiries they simply weren’t thinking of on the live site. Additionally, they lacked a comprehensive understanding of how the overall digital shopping process manifested itself for their particular product assortment.
Embedded feedback survey on Away’s website
A solution catered perfectly to Away’s online goals
Away’s goal is to provide their customers with the right information at the right time, ensuring that it is as easy to understand as possible.
“We aim to continuously enhance the Away shopping experience by effectively communicating the value of our products and showcasing the unique design elements that set us apart from competitors, all while ensuring a seamless experience. We want to meet our customers where they are, eliminating the need for them to go hunting for information. This requires a deep understanding of customer needs and how we’re meeting goals and where we can further improve.”
And this is where Mopinion came in…
Mopinion provided the flexibility we needed at the right price, allowing us to integrate the feedback survey directly into the page as opposed to forcing a floating button or a pop-up survey.
This flexibility has enabled Away to collect feedback at a pace that makes a big difference.
Currently, Away gathers a blend of qualitative and quantitative feedback at pivotal stages throughout the shopping journey, both pre- and post-order placements.
“We typically combine ratings questions (such as star ratings, thumbs up/down) with open-ended feedback questions and utilise them on key pages across the site. Additionally, we include a multiple choice question on the order confirmation page to provide the Marketing team with insights into how customers discovered our brand.”
Embedded feedback survey on Away’s website
Ben goes on to share that his team is particularly fond of the in-page forms, the various targeting options available and Mopinion’s custom styling.
“This approach enables us to track key experience metrics over time and compare them with other feedback metrics (such as NPS for example) while also gaining further insight into what drives those metrics.”
Away’s UX Research Lead maintains the program, ensuring their tracking is working as intended and adding in ad hoc surveys as necessary. From there, they collaborate with other teams across the organisation, sharing findings and insights so everyone can benefit from what they learn.
Uncovering new opportunities with feedback
Ben explains that Mopinion has had a very positive impact on Away’s digital operations.
Mopinion has enabled us to deliver an improved customer experience both before and after purchases, while also empowering us to monitor and react to metric trends that were previously inaccessible. Once the surveys were set up, overall they were very efficient and low-effort.
Embedded, post-purchase feedback survey on Away’s website
Additionally, the metrics and customer comments have been instrumental in pinpointing the area and scale of opportunities and issues, especially when multiple priorities vie for attention. This not only helps streamline internal discussions but facilitates more informed decision making.
“Our primary surveys incorporate both customer satisfaction ratings and open-ended feedback questions. We’ve developed our own scoring system to measure and monitor these ratings, integrating them with other data collected outside of Mopinion.”
In particular, the qualitative insights gleaned from the open-ended questions have proven invaluable.
“They’ve allowed us to get a better sense of how various pages are performing while also understanding where the biggest opportunities lie. For instance, we discovered our lock instructions warranted a dedicated tutorial page while also being included in our standard suitcase instructions. This adjustment significantly influenced the satisfaction ratings we track for our instruction pages.”
Away is also very satisfied with the level of support they’ve received along the way.
“We’ve received very responsive support from the Mopinion team when needed. Since we started using them, we haven’t had any major issues so it’s an all-around thumbs up from the UX team here at Away!”
Moving forward with continuous improvement
As Away moves forward with Mopinion, they are set on continuous improvement and maintaining a smooth online experience.
“We’ve reached a stage where our programme is well-established, and our focus is now on further optimising the utilisation of the data we gather throughout the organisation and ensuring we are working as closely as possible with other teams. While there are still some areas to refine and opportunities to explore eventually, such as leveraging in-email forms, our immediate priority is sustaining and enhancing the effectiveness of our existing programme.”
Special thanks to Ben Schweitzer and the Away team for these incredible insights!
Ready to see Mopinion in action?
Want to learn more about Mopinion’s all-in-1 user feedback platform? Don’t be shy and take our software for a spin! Do you prefer it a bit more personal? Just book a demo. One of our feedback pro’s will guide you through the software and answer any questions you may have.
