Automate the Entire Process

Studio Retail Limited is one of the UK’s fastest growing digital retailers, with over 1.8 million customers and 6 million orders annually through its two digital properties, studio.co.uk and ace.co.uk. The performance and reliability of Studio’s websites and mobile applications are a key component of its digital-first strategy and, as such, testing and monitoring are essential for the company to deliver on its mission. Operating under the strains of fragmented IT infrastructure, left Studio with questions on how to harmonize disparate architectures and undertake reliable end-to-end testing – enter Eggplant

Since 2005, Studio has partnered with Eggplant to avail of the latter’s intelligent, AI-driven test automation, and the relationship has expanded significantly with evolving digital retail needs and emerging technological innovations. In 2016 Studio outsourced their core testing requirements to our trusted partner Qualitest, the world’s largest independent provider of testing and quality assurance. Along with Qualitest, we are supporting Studio’s journey to rapid, automated and efficient delivery of business change

Putting the Customer in the Tester’s Seat

Studio’s goal is to be the most loved digital value retailer in the UK. Chris Platt at Studio elaborates, “It’s critical that we showcase our products in a way that keeps our customers happy and engaged and makes them want to come back and shop with us again”

The look, feel, performance and accessibility of Studio’s digital properties play a pivotal role in achieving this goal. As such, delivering a consistent high-quality experience at every interaction and on every operating system, device and platform is of paramount importance

Eggplant provides Studio with a next-generation testing platform that enables the company to do this effectively. Using scriptless models, AI and analytics, Eggplant automates the entire testing process from test-case generation to test optimization to results analytics. Rather than focusing on the code and compliance, Eggplant takes a user-centric approach that tests every permutation of the user journey. Our award-winning software is brought to life at Studio by working in lockstep with Qualitest. As a result, Studio has greater insight into how its customers are interacting with its digital problems as well as actionable intelligence on areas that are causing issues

Optimizing Improvements with Real User Data

With Eggplant, Studio can draw on real user data to augment and guide its testing strategies and make continuous improvements to drive better business outcomes. For example, Eggplant’s Digital Automation Intelligence (DAI) platform for eCommerce enabled Studio’s web team to spot a performance issue stemming from a third party’s A/B test and take steps to prevent it from recurring. Lorton elaborates

“We paused the test and watched the page load time in Eggplant – they improved immediately as the vendor’s caches cleared. The updated A/B test code was redeployed later that month and we quickly saw the same degradation in RCI, so we were able to stop it again quickly”

While it’s important to diagnose performance issues, in the highly competitive digital retail sector companies also need to understand how technology improvements can positively affect key KPIs

With Eggplant’s AI-driven testing, Studio can predict the quantified customer impact of new product versions prior to release and make any necessary changes to optimize performance. Rob, mentioned earlier, was able to predict that a drop in load times of 1.5 seconds on the Android UX translates in a £8mil increase in revenue

Eggplant’s Real Customer Insights (RCI) functionality takes real customer data and builds a model of the relationship between performance and visitor behavior. Entering an improved load time allows Studio to see a prediction of changes in conversions, bounce rate, revenue and other KPIs and also drill into this data by various customer segments

Wins from using RCI include a reduction in page load times by 15% as well as identifying journeys that translate in revenue. Another insight gleaned allowed the Studio team to redeploy testing resources as they discovered that 40% of the regression testing effort was aimed at areas of the site that were rarely used, allowing them to focus on the