About the client

Sarnova is a leading distributor of healthcare products and services across emergency medical services (EMS), acute care, and specialty healthcare markets. Through its Bound Tree and Tri-anim brands, Sarnova supports clinicians, first responders, and healthcare providers with critical equipment and supplies that directly impact patient outcomes.

As digital channels continue to play a growing role in product discovery, purchasing, and customer engagement, Sarnova recognized the need to better understand its users and optimize the experience across both platforms.

Challenge

Sarnova sought to establish a clearer, data-driven understanding of how users interact with both the Bound Tree and Tri-anim digital experiences. While both platforms served critical functions, there was limited visibility into user behaviors, motivations, and pain points. Many decisions were based on internal perspectives rather than validated qualitative and quantitative user data.

Key challenges included:

• Lack of Unified User Insight: Internal teams lacked a shared, research-backed understanding of key user segments, their goals, and how they engaged with each site.
• Limited Visibility into Customer Journeys: There was no comprehensive view of how users moved through the experience, from discovery to purchase, making it difficult to identify friction points and optimization opportunities.
• Unvalidated Assumptions: Existing decisions were often based on internal perspectives rather than validated user data.
• Missed Conversion Opportunities: Without clear insights, opportunities to streamline user flows, improve usability, and increase conversion remained largely untapped.

Solution

Sarnova partnered with XCentium to conduct a comprehensive Customer Experience Research (CXR) initiative across both Bound Tree and Tri-anim. The engagement focused on combining qualitative depth with quantitative scale to deliver a holistic understanding of user behavior and needs.

Digital Persona Development: XCentium created eight detailed digital personas, four per site, in close collaboration with stakeholders, representing core user types based on behaviors, goals, and pain points. These personas gave internal teams a shared, consistent reference point for UX decision-making.

Customer Journey Mapping: The team developed eight end-to-end customer journey maps, four per site, to visualize how users move from discovery to purchase. These maps highlighted critical touchpoints, friction areas, and moments of opportunity across the experience.

Qualitative Research - User Interviews: XCentium conducted in-depth one-on-one interviews with users from Sarnova’s customer base to uncover motivations, expectations, and real-world challenges. These conversations provided rich, human-centered insights into how users perceive and use each platform, insights that analytics alone could not surface.

Quantitative Research - Surveys: Structured surveys were designed and analyzed to gather statistically meaningful data on user satisfaction, behaviors, and performance metrics. This data validated qualitative findings and identified broader trends across the user base, ensuring recommendations were grounded in both depth and scale.

Actionable Recommendations & Reporting: XCentium delivered comprehensive reports for each platform, synthesizing insights into clear, prioritized recommendations focused on improving usability, reducing friction, and optimizing conversion.

Outcomes

The Customer Experience Research initiative provided Sarnova with a strong, evidence-based foundation to guide future digital experience improvements across both Bound Tree and Tri-anim.

• Research-Driven Decision Making: Established a validated foundation for UX strategy, replacing assumptions with data-backed insights.
• Aligned Internal Teams Around the User: Clearly defined personas created a shared understanding of customer needs, enabling more consistent and user-focused decision-making across teams.
• Identified Critical Friction Points: Customer journey mapping revealed key barriers in the user experience, highlighting concrete opportunities to streamline flows and improve engagement.
• Deep Understanding of User Behavior: Qualitative interviews uncovered nuanced insights into user motivations, expectations, and pain points that were previously unknown.
• Validated Insights at Scale: Quantitative survey data provided statistical confidence in user trends and sentiment, ensuring recommendations were grounded in both depth and breadth.
• Actionable Roadmap for Improvement: Delivered prioritized, practical recommendations that Sarnova can implement to enhance usability, improve conversion, and optimize overall site performance.

Conclusion

Through its partnership with XCentium, Sarnova gained more than just research outputs, it gained clarity. By combining qualitative and quantitative insights with structured personas and journey mapping, the organization now has a shared, data-driven understanding of its users and their needs.

This foundation enables Sarnova to move forward with confidence, making informed UX decisions that improve customer experience, drive engagement, and support long-term digital growth across both Bound Tree and Tri-anim.