The Rocket Travel by Agoda team is constantly striving to improve our platforms to drive increased customer engagement and ROI on behalf of our partners. Recently, our team had a hypothesis of how to make it easier for customers to navigate hotel and room information by optimizing the header navigation on our platform. By developing, testing and implementing an improved design, we successfully increased conversion for our partners by an amazing 7%.
Before we began to develop the newly optimized header, we conducted in-depth research. As a global company, Rocket Travel by Agoda is uniquely positioned to work with many partners across various regions. As a result, we have the opportunity to collect user feedback from customers in many different countries and capture diverse feedback from travelers around the world.
After capturing feedback and insights from a wide variety of active customers across the globe, we leveraged our designers' expertise to craft a design for the enhanced experience we wanted to offer. After collaborating with our partners and further refining our designs, we developed a new header feature that includes a menu of clickable options that persists at the top of the screen as a customer scrolls through the page. By interacting with this persistent header (or sticky header), users can quickly choose which information they want to see about a specific hotel, such as the overview, rooms, property details, guest policies, and guest reviews.
As a cutting-edge, forward thinking company, the Rocket Travel by Agoda team validates all our decisions through data. To understand the impact of the persistent header and determine the potential of improving our technology through a new feature, we launched an experiment implementing the header feature across all of our platforms. As we conducted the experiment on the sticky header, we were thrilled to validate our assumption and confirm that customers were satisfied with the change. The experiment increased the conversion rate by more than 7% on the details page. This test also demonstrated that the new navigation experience was preferred by our customer base located across different countries and regions.
We conducted a similar test using customer feedback to group hotel room types, which boosted conversion rate by 5%. Additionally, on our cars shopping experience, we improved the customer experience by developing an interactive filter that allows travelers to narrow their search by choosing the car type they are looking for from the top of the page.
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This experiment, like the others we conduct, confirmed that empowering customers with easy-to-use features allowing them to quickly gather information and confidently book travel improves the customer experience and drives significant growth for our partners’ bottom line. In a world where information is coming from every corner, we continue evolving our platforms to ensure we not only respond to, but also anticipate and exceed our traveler's expectations.
Tim Marron is the VP of Product with more than 10 years of experience leading data-obsessed product management teams across multiple industries. He has led numerous A|B testing functions and has a passion for applying scientific thinking and data to software development.