Garden of Life – Modernizing Digital Commerce Strategy to Create Stronger Customer Relationships
Transforming Total Experience: Leading Berry Brand Partnered with Rightpoint to Elevate Customer, Employee, and Product Journeys
Leading Berry Brand
No matter the industry, today’s companies compete on experience. Establishing a strong customer, employee, and product experience is crucial to staying relevant and creating a competitive advantage.
This berry brand is a global leader in farming strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries. With partner farms around the world, they lean into their strong reputation and more than 100 years of farming excellence.
But to compete in the 21st century, this berry brand needed to prioritize experience. They engaged Rightpoint to improve its Total Experience with three projects that have lasting impacts on customer, employee, and product experience.
Services
Starting with a Strategy
Supporting Customers with Sitecore Implementation
This leading berry brand first partnered with Rightpoint in 2021 for Sitecore implementation of its Mexico regional website. The existing website was lacking and did not serve a purpose. The website isn’t transactional but is still an important place to share information with growers in Mexico about new crops, farming developments, and even recipes.
Although the primary purpose isn’t sales or reaching end customers, they still needed a regional site to support its growers, the company's first level of customers. A smoother website experience boosted their credibility with their farmer customers and reduced friction in confusing communication.
To create a smoother customer experience, they wanted to move the site to a more seamless platform, so they partnered with Rightpoint to migrate their site to Sitecore. The robust new site is easier for customers to navigate. The simple, modern design matches the berry brand and is a strong representation of the company.
After the initial implementation, Rightpoint maintained a small team focused on enhancing the build. With the website functioning properly and with a branded design, Rightpoint has shifted its focus to ensuring the site stays live.
The results of the Mexico regional website update were positive. They have plans to expand the project to other regional teams in Europe and the United States.
Work
Streamlining Internal Content Access
Their internal employee network is home to an incredible amount of data and content accessed by teams around the world. In late 2023, this leading berry farmer identified a need to modernize it by migrating it off SharePoint 2016 OnPrem and onto the O365 Cloud platform.
They had a large internal content management footprint, so the goal of moving the intranet was also to create a hub-and-spoke format for business units to create content and leverage it across all channels and teams. Instead of each group managing its own content and often creating duplicates, the migrated site aimed to connect users with relevant content more quickly. A streamlined experience modernizes internal communication and reduces redundancies.
Rightpoint led them through the process of determining what content to keep, edit, or remove by considering what content is relevant and current content and content that had already been used.
They were very pleased with Rightpoint’s initial assessment and are building and migrating the site. Nearly 300 gigabytes of data will be migrated to the new site, and employees will have easier access to relevant information.
In the new intranet, the O365 Cloud platform uses contextual relevance to an employee’s role to narrow down results. Before, an employee on the finance team could search for financial information about berries grown in Mexico in Q2 2022 and find a huge number of results with those keywords. Now, contextual relevance narrows down results so the finance team will see financial results, and other teams can easily find content and information targeted to their job duties.
The result is a better quality of life for employees when sharing, storing, and maintaining documents and content. Employees can increase efficiency by decreasing time spent wading through irrelevant search results.
Boosting Product Experience with a Centralized App
With thousands of employees and growing partners worldwide, this leading berry brand leverages many technology tools. One of the most repetitive tools was its myriad of single-use apps for field workers. There were numerous apps, each performing one primary function, such as logging the number of berries or quality control. These apps didn’t have consistent design or branding and were cumbersome to use. A single field worker could have five different apps to manage different use cases for the berries and would spend their day navigating between each app for various tasks. The process was inefficient and frustrating.
One reason the apps hadn’t been updated is that field workers often don’t have service while on the berry farms. They needed a way to better manage data storage offline and connect field workers and other employees to updated data when they got back online.
Rightpoint did the strategy architecture for a new super app that would combine all the single-use apps into a single, user-friendly dashboard. During the high-level design phase, Rightpoint recommended a single hub app with different dashboards or functions for each task or type of worker. And with that, their custom app was born.
Instead of navigating through numerous disparate apps, all employees and partners use the same app with the experience tailored to their role and permissions. The systems sync to create a single chain of thought, which minimizes the tech footprint without sacrificing productivity.
Connecting the single-use apps into one central app creates consistency and familiarity. Users know how to navigate the app because it is familiar, and they don’t have to work through a new system for every task.
The project's second phase was creating a full design system for the app and all future apps. Rightpoint designed a library of components, including icons and typefaces, so that they can quickly generate new templates and dashboards as the need for new features and use cases arises. That ensures that all future projects can fit seamlessly into the central app’s design.
Outcomes
Rightpoint’s Widespread Impact
This leading berry brand’s wide variety of needs shows how different areas of a large company can all tie back to experience. Partnering on three distinct projects brought together Rightpoint’s practice areas to support their needs in different ways.
As Rightpoint built trust with them and showed the impact of its work, the project expanded into new areas, creating new opportunities for Rightpoint to make a difference. By streamlining and improving the Total Experience, Rightpoint helped set them up for long-term success.
