Industry: Utilities/Power/Gas
Our client, a well-known U.S.-based utility company, serves more than 7 million customers across 20 states, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In continuous operations for well over a century, this company is respected for its unstinting efforts to provide clean, safe, reliable, and affordable energy solutions that help meet their customers’ needs, while minimizing their own environmental footprint.
The Challenge
Low-Performing Customer-Facing Website Adversely Affecting The Client’s Digital Presence
Despite its past successes, the utility firm was falling behind its competitors in one crucial area – its digital presence. Its old-fashioned website was consistently failing to deliver the unified experiences its customers demanded – a serious disadvantage in an increasingly digitized world.
The utility company urgently needed to overhaul its website in order to provide a user-friendly, personalized online experience to its customers. But due to its legacy Sitecore CMS, it was unable to quickly create or publish the high-quality content needed to do so consistently and to scale. These drawbacks were affecting the firm’s customer relationships, as well as its financial health and market reputation.
The business needed a new website that would:
- Offer customers a modern, richer experience
- Be capable of providing multi-lingual support
- Provide an easy-to-use back-end platform so business users could update the website quickly without having to wait for IT teams
- Enable visitor segmentation and content personalization
The Solution
Migration to Latest Sitecore Platform + Design of Modern, Up-to-date Website
SingleStone initially provided maintenance services for the utilities client’s legacy Sitecore platform. Later, we performed a data-led technical and feature-based analysis to show that their existing platform would not help them meet their website transformation goals. Following this, our cross-functional team of project managers, business analysts, designers, and Sitecore experts drew up a multi-phased project roadmap. They defined a new technical architecture and planned the end-to-end migration and deployment. They also set up 4 ‘workstreams’ to efficiently manage content, design, development, and change management. Based on this plan and our time-tested ‘build/test/demo/deploy’ process, we completed the systematic deployment and migration of over 800 pages of web-based content to the latest Sitecore platform. We also helped formulate a robust content strategy and redesigned the current website with the new Sitecore CMS. Throughout the 16-month project, we collaborated closely with the client’s IT team to ensure seamless production roll-out. This partnership was the key driver for project success.
In brief, our comprehensive solution package included all these elements:
- Migration to the latest Sitecore platform (800+ pages)
- End-to-end project delivery: Build, test, demo, and deploy
- Formulate a content strategy and testing strategy
- Define and execute four workstreams: Content, design, development, and change management
- Define new technical architecture and new ecosystem
- Identify new infrastructure needs (e.g. servers) for the updated setup
- Deployment and execution support for the in-house IT team
The Results
Engaging New Website + Reduction in FTE Support Calls
SingleStone delivered a new customer-facing website that’s now a crucial element of the client’s digital presence. Just a few months later, it received a prestigious MarCom award, edging out a number of other websites – thanks to its intuitive interface, up-to-date copy, and unstinting focus on value delivery.
Updated Sitecore CMS: Corporate communication personnel can quickly publish high-quality content on the new website without relying on IT teams. As a result, end customers have better and faster access to relevant information and enjoy personalized, memorable experiences that promote long-term loyalty.
Updated website: Customers of this utility firm can easily navigate the new multi-lingual site and quickly find their own solutions through enhanced self-service options for billing, service start/stop, etc.
Less pressure on customer support: Since customers no longer call support as often, the team can now concentrate on more future-focused, revenue-generating activities.
Ongoing maintenance and support: We also continue to support the client with 2 developers, 1 project manager, and 1 UX designer. These personnel take care of day-to-day CMS and site maintenance and address issues quickly before they affect the firm’s operations or business goals. Equally important, we also work with them to understand their short-, medium- and long-term strategic digital engagement goals, and make ongoing enhancements to keep them moving towards those objectives.
SingleStone is a Sitecore Silver Partner with a highly-skilled and experienced team of developers, architects, project managers, and MVPs. They have the technical expertise and the business acumen needed to understand our clients’ business and content goals, and support them at every stage of their Sitecore project. We have successfully implemented, integrated, and customized Sitecore XM CMS for many organizations. We can do the same for you. Call or email us today to discuss your Sitecore project, and please ask for a free demo.