And the improvements we’ve been making for the last 5 years have consistently driven up the value per customer. I think a lot of what’s happening is we are continuing that trend with consumer customer facing experience improvements. But very importantly, the second factor, the number of new customers are now starting to get traction and it’s certainly an important part, our customer experience is certainly an important part of that, but it also has a lot of great work in the marketing teams and others to find ways to drive that. So, in terms of some examples, I think you really have to look back for the last 4 or 5 years and see we started with some very large brute force changes, moving our discount level is down dramatically. We still discount, but much less certain in the past.
Change in how we advertise, change in how we talk about our business and our, the customer value we deliver. We spent more than 3 years migrating the technology stack, and only finished that up 18 months ago. We invested in talent in a lot of different areas. We didn’t do all that right, but we made a lot of good decisions. And we are now seeing 18 months after the tech migration, about 15 months after committing to move to what are known as empowered product teams. We’re seeing that a lot of those things are starting to click, the teams are able to be more focused on improvements rather than these big shifts, and that it comes down to things that matter to our customers. So as two examples, I could start with site search. It could be, that’s much better than it has been in the past.
We think we can make it better. Mobile first design flows are reducing the friction of checkout, improving the layout of the homepage or some of the core merchandising pages to improve findability. The pace of new product introduction is coming up dramatically from where it was a year ago. It’s still not where we think it can be and it’s not at the pace we see in our upload and print businesses, but it’s improving. We’ve improved design service offerings and started to integrate those more deeply in the experience. We’ve taken learnings from VistaCreate and we’re bringing those into the core of VistaPrint experience. We’re acquiring, as I mentioned, more customers that it certainly comes from great marketing improvement, but also very importantly improved conversion rates, because of the site improvements.
And so finally, we’ve done a lot of work on product quality and on time to customer and customer service improvements, which has multiple effects. One is, it improves our retention rates, which has huge value of the cohorts. And two, it’s driven down our credit rate. We still have a very customer centric approach to credit, but as we make fewer mistakes, we will make we issue fewer credits and that’s healthy. So I’ll stop there, but really I would summarize by saying there’s no one silver bullet, which has changed things, we see this as an overall acceleration of the velocity, the faster cadence of new product or new customer facing improvements, and we think that will continue.
Meredith Burns: It’s just really exciting to see that inside the Company as well and just, like, adding my own editorial comments here. Let’s move to the next question, Robert, I’m going to stick with you. How far along are you in the process of integrating more robust design services into the Vista customer experience? Can you give us a progress update on VistaCreate in terms of user growth and other key metrics that you’re tracking?
Robert Keane: Great. So there are a couple of questions there. There’s design services overall, and there’s VistaCreate specifically. So Florian in our most recent Investor Day spoke about exposing design services from the 99designs community to VistaPrint customers. We have taken a slow approach there, it’s taken longer than I would have originally expected. I think any of us would have. But again, a lot of that was related to a need to fix some of the other things I just talked about in terms of tech migrations, new product team structures and so on. But we are seeing the benefits when by making that smoother for customers who need design help get it and we’re going to continue to test and learn and incorporate improvements into the experience.
And importantly, we are now working to say how can we make sure the flow between, if you think of a spectrum from getting customer service to getting customer service based help to getting a professional to help you, making sure that that’s a smooth transition back and forth, for customers who at different points in their customer journey need different types of service. With ultimate design overall, more pervasive through the customer experience, how design agents. We know the design customer service agents and we know that designers from the 99designs network have much higher LTV. So, making incremental improvements has helped the, I would put that in the category of what I spoke about for the prior question, it’s an example of improving satisfaction, conversion, revenue, profitability.
If you go into the site, you’ll see a lot more offers for design help for custom or bespoke design support on the homepage, in the studio, in chat boxes that pop-up and on pages for more complex products. We also have the team is driving mobile offerings with a range of design options and experiences, which is very much related to 99designs and work that we’ve done since we’ve acquired 99designs. We are incorporating the VistaCreate capabilities into the VistaDesign studio within Vista Print that is taking time because of the architectural underlying components. But we are on a trajectory of making incremental studio experiences to make it better for our customers. And you can see some of this, for instance, the logo maker where you download the finished logo and a brand kit, that’s now available in Vista Create as well.
