1-800-PACK-RAT + UserTesting

1-800-PACK-RAT provides moving and storage services to residential and commercial customers. The organization’s website is critical for generating new business, but 1-800-PACK-RAT designed the site more than eight years ago. The business sought to increase online conversion rates (i.e., conversion from web visit to quote form submission) by refreshing their brand and updating their online quote module.

Changing the quote module, which generates over 85% of the company’s leads, posed a substantial risk for 1-800-PACK-RAT. Tiffany Glass, the organization’s Chief Digital & Technology Officer, says, “We recognized how careful we needed to be when proposing changes. People value privacy and hesitate to give out their information. We all believe the studies that show the more you ask someone to fill out, the higher your dropoff rate will be, so we try to keep it simple and only ask the minimum of what we need to generate a quote.”

Since the quote model is essential to securing ongoing sales, 1-800-PACK-RAT hired a design agency. Best practices suggested changing from a form with all fields on a single page to a step-by-step journey for the customer across multiple web pages. No one likes moving, so a customized experience would increase conversion rates exponentially!

Before 1-800-PACK-RAT transferred the agency’s designs to the live website, they put them in front of potential customers from the UserTesting Contributor Network to validate their new approach. It was the organization’s first time working with UserTesting, and they rightfully timed this step pre-launch. The UserTesting onboarding team suggested that 1-800-PACK-RAT use A/B tests with screener questions, preliminary tasks, multiple choice questions, verbal questions, and wrap-up tasks for their study. Then the 1-800-PACK-RAT team watched the video clips of UserTesting contributors answering questions and interacting with the new quote model.

Surprise—not a single UserTesting contributor liked the new design! Everyone preferred the pre-existing design that requested customer information at the outset. 1-800-PACK-RAT’s research and design experts suspected they had received feedback from outliers, so they conducted more studies with UserTesting. They got the same results. So they scrapped the handholding path, along with the multi-stage quote model. 

Glass explains, “We not only tested our old quote form versus the redesigned version, but we also tested our new version versus the quote model from our primary competition. We thought their design was ugly, with a small font and too many fields. We were sure ours was better, but we were now zero for two. Testers liked the competitor’s model better because it was professional, clean, and easy to understand. Wow! Seeing and hearing reactions from UserTesting contributors was priceless. We went back to journey mapping and design boards, updating our quote form to make it a single page. When we tested that, our upgraded version won. Phew!”

In the first week after 1-800-PACK-RAT relaunched their online quote model, conversion rates increased by 10%! The organization made no other changes to their website, as they wanted to isolate the impact of the redesign, for better or worse. Some among the company’s leadership felt shocked at first—what happened to the design the agency put together? When they reviewed a summary of the feedback from potential customers, they understood the change in direction. The proof was in the data. 

Today, everyone feels proud of the organization’s revamped quote design, which looks modern, friendly, and simple to complete. 1-800-PACK-RAT’s leadership also appreciated that implementing the feedback from potential customers quickly paid for the investment in UserTesting. The overnight improvement in conversion meant they were sending more leads to their Sales Team and increasing the return on the ad spend that drives traffic to their website.