Polyflor are renowned flooring manufacturers, providing high-quality floor coverings to commercial and residential clients internationally. 

Since 1915, Polyflor has provided a customer-focused service for healthcare organisations, educational institutions, upmarket retail outlets, and even family homes. 

They pride themselves on taking the time to understand their customers’ requirements to match them with an ideal flooring solution. 

Polyflor wanted to expand their client base in the UK, whilst building a solid foundation for international expansion. Before embarking on a transformation of their digital platform, they needed to come to a consensus regarding a few major questions:

• Should we merge the commercial and residential flooring websites?
• Will international users understand our product offering in their country?
• Is the existing purchase journey optimised for our customers?
• Can we improve efficiency across product management and fulfilment? 
  
  

Alongside the Polyflor team, we embarked on an in-depth Discovery and Definition project. Through detailed research, we aimed to answer these questions and to define an ideal digital solution.

Polyflor’s products are highly specialised and most often sold to industry experts. Because of this, we wanted to dedicate the time to understanding the core of the business so that the finished site would do justice to the specialist product offering.

Our discovery process involved some of the team undertaking onsite training at one of Polyflor’s warehouses. Polyflor’s experts led us through product familiarisation and helped to immerse our digital team in the everyday workings of the flooring manufacturers. We saw firsthand and learned about the product types offered by Polyflor. 

This onsite induction helped us to understand the industry-specific terminology that we needed to incorporate into our research and designs.

We compounded our specific knowledge of Polyflor’s company with a detailed analysis of competitors in the industry. Not only did we want to learn about the products themselves, but we planned to outperform the user experience that customers had learned to expect within this industry.

Before we could merge the two Polyflor sites, we needed to understand the primary users of each domain. 

In combining both commercial and residential user journeys, we needed to meet current users’ expectations and minimise any friction caused by the site migration.

We assessed the level of technical information that each audience type sought before making an informed purchase decision. We analysed users’ interest in news, online case studies and Polyflor product pages. We also reviewed users’ engagement with certain search filters and with sector-specific content. 

We found that commercial users most often opted to read Polyflor news and case studies, but they would defer to telephone contact to place a direct order. 

Comparatively, residential and new users spent more time reading product specifications and informative content about use cases to help them decide between similar products. 

To translate our research and data analysis into a digestible and useful format, we created User Personas for each audience type. These character profiles detail the desires and frustrations of each user group to enable Polyflor to help its customers.

From this, the two websites were migrated into a single site which seamlessly incorporates both the Residential and Commercial aspects of Polyflor’s offerings. The new single site has a clearly defined user journey for each of the different user personas.

Polyflor’s catalogue of products contains a vast quantity of technical specifications and industry terminology. Each product also has multiple augmentations and views. Maintaining this level of variation and specificity required labour-intensive management.

To simplify content management of the product listings, we implemented an industry-leading Product Information Management system (PIM), called Akeneo. 

This PIM system enables Polyflor’s product managers to control pricing, imagery and product specifications from a central system. Using Akeneo, Polyflor’s team only needs to update a product listing once, and the new data will automatically appear across all instances of that product. Not only does this system improve efficiency, but it also ensures accurate product details for those commercial clients who must comply with legal specifications.