Natural Choice – Giving Users Peace of Mind with an Intuitive IoT Product
Delivering the Future by Transforming the Customer Experience
Composite Decking Manufacturer
An international manufacturer of composite decking products needed to modernize their online capabilities to evolve to the next level. They partnered with Rightpoint to completely reengineer their existing website, e-commerce experience, and back-end technology. The result of the collaboration is a wholly new platform that delivers a more consistent and seamless customer experience while simultaneously improving the efficiency and flexibility of internal content creation and commerce functionality.
Services
Starting with a Strategy
What do you do when you’re a very successful, international company operating in a more traditional industry that has — as a whole — fallen behind the digital transformation curve?
You have two choices: 1) Stay the course and try to stay afloat doing things the ways they’ve always been done — patching systems together to try to bridge the gap between past and present, or 2) strip everything down to the studs and build a strong new foundation that can carry you confidently into the future.
This client chose option two.
Until recently, this manufacturer of eco-friendly composite decking products had been focusing the majority of their resources on continually improving their already industry-leading products. However, recent business growth had revealed important market opportunities that they could only pursue if they made some substantial improvements to their digital capabilities.
To take advantage of these further growth opportunities, the first thing they needed to do was reengineer their outdated website and e-commerce experiences. They were dealing with four main challenges, which affected both their customers and their internal teams:
Disjointed Customer Experience: The existing website consisted of two components — a marketing website and separate e-commerce site. These two sites not only looked and behaved differently for customers but were also not integrated on the back end. The result was a confusing experience that at best merely inconvenienced customers, and at worst damaged brand perception and customer trust.
Overwhelming Customer Experience: In a similar vein, the overall structure and organization of the site had not been overhauled in a long time. It was difficult for customers to locate the information they needed, and there was also a lot of content duplication on each site and across the two separate sites.
Decentralized Product Information: The company did not have a single source of truth that their retailers and other partners could turn to for the most complete and up-to-date product information. This meant that consumers could get conflicting information from different sources.
Inefficient Content Publication Process: The existing sites were extremely difficult to maintain and update. Even fairly simple updates to the main and international websites required a very painful, manual process that often involved IT support and sometimes took weeks to fully implement.
As this company looked ahead to their future, they knew they needed to invest in a digital transformation that could help them:
Evolve into a true e-commerce company with a customer experience that meets the expectations of today’s savvy consumers.
Better support their retail partners around the world
Take advantage of the growth opportunities that would bring their organization to the next level.
Work
After assessing the company’s situation and objectives, the Rightpoint team recommended re-platforming the entire back end of the online properties by replacing the existing CMS with Adobe Experience Manager, and the existing e-commerce platform with Adobe Commerce. In addition, Rightpoint would also deliver a light front-end redesign.
The project was a long-term, from-the-ground-up effort that required buy in from across the client organization and collaboration with multiple teams. The primary deliverables included:
Streamlining the overall experience by eliminating instances of content replication and downsizing and condensing the site structure into a more manageable number of pages.
Redesigning and reengineering customer checkout with a focus on making the experience faster, easier, and more cohesive with the marketing website. This work enabled, for the first time in the client’s history, a truly seamless end-to-end commerce journey.
Introducing a PIM (product information management) system that provides a consolidated place to house all product information and facilitate easy downloads to use on various online sites. This addition makes it much easier to keep marketing content and product specs consistent and up to date across the client’s wide range of channels (brand website, retailer websites, and so forth).
Implementing new connectors and other tools to make it easier for the client to maintain content for the global network of sites in one place. For example, the Language Translation Connector makes it simple for the client to quickly facilitate easy translation for maintenance of their international sites.
Consolidating the client’s overall design system including developing updated governance and other guidelines.
Outcomes
The end result of the work is a fully integrated shopping experience that allows the consumer to move seamlessly from marketing content to e-commerce transactions. The new site delivers a much more consistent and cohesive experience that encompasses the entire customer journey from browsing to purchase, and which reflects the client’s expertise and leadership.
In addition to the consumer-facing transformation, the client now has much more powerful and efficient tools for managing, publishing, and distributing product information and other content across their global network of websites and retail partners. This greatly improved ability to communicate makes the company more agile and responsive within their market.
The design efforts focused on combining the marketing and commerce experiences. The back-end work required a complete reengineering of the client’s website platform, which presented some challenges. On the coding and development side of things, the Rightpoint team had to start from scratch and rebuild. But, by working closely and collaboratively with the client’s in-house team, Rightpoint was able to deliver the project on time and on budget without disrupting the client’s business at all.
The new consumer-facing experience combined with the completely overhauled back-end functionality of Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Commerce gives the client a very strong foundation on which to build the next iteration of their global business.
Our Contributions
Capabilities
Insights
Strategy
Design
Content
Engineering
Our Contributions
Technology
Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Commerce
