A Unified, Intelligent, Customer-First, Digital Ecosystem for Hammerson
Hammerson operates some of the UK’s most iconic retail destinations, each home to hundreds of shops, restaurants, leisure experiences, and events. Their digital estate plays a vital role in shaping discovery, driving footfall, and expressing the unique character of each destination.
A Unified, Intelligent, Customer-First, Digital Ecosystem for Hammerson
Hammerson operates some of the UK’s most iconic retail destinations, each home to hundreds of shops, restaurants, leisure experiences, and events. Their digital estate plays a vital role in shaping discovery, driving footfall, and expressing the unique character of each destination.
What we achieved
Background
Goal: drive discovery across retailers
Hammerson operates flagship retail destinations in the UK, Ireland, and France. Their portfolio includes 10 shopping centres, including renowned destinations such as Bullring in Birmingham and Brent Cross in North London. Despite the prestige of these locations, competitor analysis and user testing highlighted opportunity with their existing website search functionality along with prospect of delivering a consistent and engaging user experience under a unified creative direction.
“The new design and UX has made a huge impact, not only from a look and feel point of view but also performance!”
We partnered closely with Hammerson across strategy, design, technology, and ongoing operations and designed a system to boost engagement, keep shoppers on the site for longer and enhance discovery across retailers.
Our solution
We deployed a next-gen search experience, laying the foundation for natural language search.
- AI Tagging:
- The search recognises category terms, allowing users to search for what they want, not just who they know.
- Smart Suggestions:
- When no exact match exists, the intelligent search surfaces similar retailers, competitors, or related offers, reducing dead ends and encouraging users to explore more of the site.
- Cloud-native performance:
- Built on scalable infrastructure to deliver fast, reliable, interactions.
- Automated ingestion:
- Robust data pipelines pull retailer content from each site’s Prismic CMS into a central system.
- Real-time enrichment:
- Retailer profiles are enriched with live data, including opening hours sourced from Google Places, ensuring accuracy and consistency.
- Helpful revenue features:
- We introduced new monetisation opportunities designed to feel like part of the experience; adding value for users while unlocking sustainable commercial growth.
- Ongoing performance & reliability:
- Through their web maintenance retainer we offer proactive monitoring for security and stability, rapid issue resolution and continuous performance optimisation to maintain best-in-class page speed.
The increase in daily search volume has far exceeded expectations.
Shoppers are actively using the search to discover new retailers rather than simply returning to familiar brands.
