CDON, one of the Nordic region’s leading e-commerce marketplaces, has transformed its approach to customer experience (CX) under the leadership of Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) Kattis Åström. By prioritizing customer satisfaction, leveraging data-driven insights, and utilizing customer journey mapping, CDON has aligned its operations to deliver exceptional experiences. This case study explores CDON’s journey and the valuable lessons it offers to CX and business leaders.
Challenges: Delivering great customer experiences at CDON
As a marketplace, CDON operates differently from traditional e-commerce platforms, introducing unique challenges to delivering seamless customer experiences. Some of the key hurdles included:
- Low customer satisfaction scores: Historical metrics indicated room for improvement, affecting loyalty and retention.
- Shared ownership of the customer journey: Third-party merchants manage fulfillment and delivery, complicating CDON’s ability to ensure consistent experiences from purchase to delivery.
- Ineffective communication strategies: Blanket marketing campaigns lacked personalization, resulting in disengaged customers.
- Siloed team structures: Departments struggled to see how their work impacted the overall customer experience, creating a need for cross-functional alignment.
Kattis Åström explained: “At CDON, we realized customer happiness wasn’t just a priority—it was the foundation for our growth as a marketplace. To succeed, we needed to unify our approach to the customer journey.”
Solution: Using customer journey maps to drive alignment
To address these challenges, CDON turned to customer journey mapping as a critical tool for transforming customer experience. By visualizing and analyzing every stage of the customer journey, the organization aligned its teams, streamlined processes, and identified actionable opportunities for improvement.
1. Mapping the entire customer journey
CDON developed comprehensive customer journey maps to understand better how customers interacted with their platform and the needs, behaviors, and expectations customers had at each point in the journey. These maps allowed the team to:
- Identify friction points across critical stages, from browsing to post-purchase.
- Prioritize improvements based on data-driven insights.
- Clarify how each department’s efforts contributed to the overall experience.
“Mapping the journey made everything visible. It connected the dots between departments and showed everyone how their work impacted the customer experience,” said Kattis.
2. Building a customer-centric organizational structure
The insights from customer journey mapping drove CDON to reorganize its teams around the customer experience:
- Commercial team focused on driving traffic and enhancing the online shopping experience.
- Logistics team ensured that merchant deliveries met CDON’s standards for timeliness and quality.
- Brand and CX team worked on improving customer experience and overall satisfaction, uniting these efforts with the company’s brand promise.
“At CDON, we aligned everything—from attracting traffic to handling delivery—to reflect the customer’s journey,” Kattis Åström explained.
3. Leveraging data for continuous improvement
Customer journey maps were enriched with quantitative and qualitative insights, enabling CDON to:
- Replace traditional Net Promoter Scores (NPS) with actionable customer satisfaction metrics for key journey stages.
- Measure the impact of specific changes, for example segmenting email communications to target lifecycle stages and customer preferences.
- Use customer reviews and merchant feedback as continuous improvement tools.
“By integrating data into our journey maps, we could tie our decisions directly to measurable outcomes. It wasn’t just about fixing problems but creating sustainable growth,” Kattis noted.
4. Strengthening merchant partnerships
Given CDON’s marketplace model, merchants play a crucial role in the customer journey. By integrating merchant data and feedback into their journey mapping process, CDON was able to:
- Establish clearer expectations and accountability for merchants.
- Foster partnerships that prioritized shared goals of customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Create guidelines and tools to ensure a seamless shopping and delivery experience.
Results: A more cohesive and impactful customer experience
The use of customer journey mapping and the alignment of CDON’s operations around CX led to transformative results:
- Improved customer satisfaction: Customer feedback and satisfaction scores were improved significantly, reflecting a more seamless and enjoyable shopping experience at CDON.
- Increased customer retention: Clearer communication strategies and loyalty-building efforts led to repeat purchases and greater customer loyalty.
- Stronger merchant performance: Enhanced partnerships with merchants ensured better delivery reliability and consistency.
- Cross-functional collaboration: CDON’s departments now work together more cohesively, driving shared accountability for CX outcomes.
“For us, the entire customer journey matters—from the first click to the final delivery. Focusing on the customer journey has allowed us to deliver better customer experiences while driving growth,” Kattis said.
Kattis’s tips for customer experience and business leaders
Drawing from CDON’s journey, Kattis Åström offers practical and actionable advice for leaders looking to elevate their customer experience strategies:
- Start with customer journey mapping: Visualizing the customer journey helps identify customer needs, find friction points, prioritize improvements, and create cross-functional alignment.
- Use data to guide decisions: Combine qualitative insights with measurable metrics to ensure your efforts deliver real results.
- Align teams around the journey: Organizing departments based on the customer journey fosters better collaboration and accountability.
- Collaborate with external partners: In a marketplace model, aligning third-party contributors to your CX goals is essential for success.
- Focus on incremental wins: Start with small, high-impact changes that build momentum and demonstrate value.
“Customer journey mapping gave us the clarity we needed to connect the dots across our teams and focus on what truly matters—the customer experience,” Kattis reflected.
Conclusion: CDON’s model for customer-centric growth
CDON’s transformation demonstrates the power of a customer-first approach supported by robust customer journey mapping. By aligning operations, leveraging data, and fostering cross-functional collaboration, CDON has set a new standard for how e-commerce marketplaces can deliver exceptional experiences while achieving sustainable growth.
For organizations aspiring to elevate their CX strategies, Kattis Åström’s advice is clear: “The customer journey is the key to success. Invest in it, align your teams, and let the data guide you. The results will speak for themselves.”
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By Tove Lundell
