Dweet
Dweet
Open to Permanent
Open to Permanent

Niall Hanlon

I have over 18 years’ experience within the retail and financial services sectors, leading CX and UX on web and apps.
About

I'm a skilled, forward-thinking e-commerce professional with a passion for delivering compelling digital customer experiences. I'm motivated by improving customer satisfaction, driving innovation, and creating exceptional digital products that promote business success. I have over 18 years' experience within the retail and financial services sectors, leading the digital customer experience across web and apps. I manage multi-disciplined teams covering Product, UX & UI Design, Development, Digital Marketing, Analytics, User Research, CRO, Content and SEO. My varied knowledge enables me to work very closely with the people around me. I take an active role in challenging perceptions, prompting discussions and leveraging the knowledge and skills within my teams to achieve the best results.

Previous Brands
AO.com
Distrelec
Morrisons
Party Delights
Sainsbury's Group
UK POS
ZenAuto (Zenith)
Work Experience
Head of Online Customer
Aug ‘22 - Apr ‘23
Sainsbury's Group

• Responsible for delivering digital experience innovation across all brands and channels, managing multiple cross-functional teams accountable for customer and colleague facing products and services. Working collaboratively within the organisation to deliver unique, integrated, and best-in-class experiences across Sainsbury's, Argos, Tu and Habitat. • Overseeing all aspects of UX processes and outputs, while promoting the value of UX across the business. Improving ways of working and helping divisions understand the benefit and strategic importance of the CX team in supporting the broader corporate strategy. • Landed the adoption of agile practices, workflow management, and communication tools to ensure the department's 70+ designers, researchers, content and accessibility specialists are set up to successfully deliver upon varied and highly-complex strategic initiatives. • Evolved design processes, embedded prioritisation frameworks, and implemented enhanced tooling to ensure CX leadership has maximum visibility of all departmental work, resource capacity, and issues / delivery bottlenecks relating to strategic priorities. • Delivered an org redesign based on customer intent, providing a holistic focus on customer needs and ensuring delivery of highly-efective solutions. Fostering a growth-culture of end-to end customer understanding, resource flexibility, and collective colleague up-skilling.

E-commerce Director
Nov ‘21 - Jul ‘22
UK POS

• Complete ownership of the E-commerce P&L, leading a multi-disciplined department encompassing design, UX, CRO, web development, digital and print marketing, content and SEO, merchandising, promotions, and brand development. • Acting as chief product manager for the e-commerce business, driving the highest standards across all areas of the online user journey, digital channels, and customer touch-points. • Directed the marketing strategy, managing a £650k budget across email, PPC, PLA, social, display, SEO, and direct mail. Implemented an extensive optimisation programme across all marketing activity improving targeting, content, collateral, ofers, and performance KPIs. • Closely managed agency paid-ad activity, successfully scaling PPC budgets to £45k monthly, while achieving a 32% uplift in return on ad spend (740%+) across all platforms. Launched successful social campaigns supporting brand / promos, while sustaining a £2900%+ ROAS. • Managed the website migration strategy from Magento 1 to Magento 2. Ensured a robust product plan was in place, delivering 90% of outstanding project work in 6 months. • Established a suite of reporting dashboards to democratise data and instil data-first thinking into business processes. Supported web, marketing, sales and product teams, using Data Studio automating reporting, and producing detailed analysis of departmental performance. Employment history

Head of Customer
Jan ‘21 - Oct ‘21
ZenAuto (Zenith)

• Responsible for the ZenAuto digital proposition, covering the online customer experience, digital marketing, content strategy, and brand execution across all channels. Accountable for delivering a market-leading e-commerce journey, ensuring continued improvement to the online customer experience across all core KPIs. • Managed the ZenAuto product development process. Identified consumer needs and commercial business requirements, and developed a prioritised roadmap of enhancements, ensuring successful delivery through lean and agile development practices. • Led the digital marketing strategy, managing a £1 m budget across multiple agencies, covering PPC, Social, Display, Content and SEO. Delivered a 24% reduction in PPC CPA over 6 months and improved organic rankings across top 100 keywords by 46%. • Successfully launched the Used Car leasing proposition, enabling the business to ofer previously leased vehicles from their fleet. Delivered a complete UX redesign of the existing site navigation, search and vehicle config, including performance, scalability improvements. • Delivered CRM and communications improvements across the customer journey, ensuring customers are adequately informed throughout the pre-order and quoting, order and welcome, in-life customer service, and return of car journey stages.

Head of Technology
Jun ‘18 - Aug ‘20
Party Delights

• Complete ownership of the Party Delights UX, product and technology strategy. Accountable for delivering user-focused features and improvements to all digital products including UK & EU websites, proprietary back-ofice applications across product, content and warehousing. • Led the complete re-design and roll-out of Party Delights web journey, delivering improvements to usability, conversion and site performance, and significantly optimising and consolidating the code-base, improving deployment eficiency and site maintenance. • Successfully managed the launch of EU distribution through all existing EU websites, saving 35% in annual costs, and reducing delivery times by an average of 2 days for all EU customers. • Introduced Agile practices to the business to transform how projects and issues are raised, prioritised, and managed through the department. Improved delivery of dev projects by over 60% in 12 months, and took Service Desk SLA success rate to a consistent 95%+. • Significantly improved warehouse operations through a complete rewrite of the warehouse management software, increasing eficiency of picking (+26%) and packing (+12%) metrics, streamlining returns processing, and providing granular performance analyses. • Managed a £1 .6m budget, delivering over £300k in cost savings through new supplier contracts, supplier negotiations, rationalisation of services, and technology advances. Employment history

Head of UX & Functional Proposition
Sep ‘17 - Feb ‘18
Distrelec

• Successfully built a new in-house team of UX, Product and UAT professionals. Established a customer-focused vision of the Distrelec online journey, using data and analysis to build a strategic roadmap of improvement, fulfilling both business and customer requirements. • Responsible for prioritising and managing all design and development projects, ensuring successful delivery of product enhancements and functionality innovations.

Head of Online - UX, Devices & Content
Dec ‘15 - Aug ‘17
Morrisons

• Ownership of the Morrisons digital product portfolio. Accountable for delivering highly intuitive, customer-centric user experiences; which provided a consistent, relevant and device appropriate experience across all online touch points. • Led the re-design of the core groceries website journey, delivering an 11.3% conversion uplift and contributing £1 0m+ in annual sales. Successfully managed the design and launch of the Food to Order website contributing £1 .3m in sales to the business. • Managed a £2.3m budget, delivering over £1 .2m in cost savings through the optimisation of digital architecture and services, recruitment of a new internal team, and successful closure of the Morrisons M Digital agency in London. • Closely managed the relationship with technology partner Ocado. Supervised the of-site dev team, establishing robust Agile processes and communication channels to ensure requirements were met and projects were delivered on time and within budget.

Group Head of Web Platform
Apr ‘13 - Dec ‘15
AO.com

• Responsible for the AO.com online journey, managing a team of 25, and ensuring all design and development was customer-focused and provided intuitive, user-friendly experiences that met customer's needs across all digital products, devices, and touch points. • Managed high-profile projects including the complete re-design of the AO online journey (winning the Which 2015 Best Online Shop award), launch of the Mobile site (increasing conversion 300%+), launch of consumer electronics, and expansion into overseas markets. • Drove the optimisation strategy across all devices. Ensured data, customer research and best-practices were at the heart of everything the team delivered. Focused on continuous improvement of the online journey and key site metrics. • Defined and delivered the platform and user experience strategy across the UK and Europe. Identified highest value ROI projects and established priorities based on comprehensive market and customer analysis, and future business objectives.

Languages
English - Fluent
Education & Training
Senior College Ballyfermot
HND in Digital Media & Design
Manchester, UK