We helped a Premium eCommerce Holiday Provider relaunch their website, CMS, and CRM systems to support the online sales booking business.
The Activity
When the strategic development began, the Forge team soon realised that the customer’s in-house teams needed additional assistance in acquiring and implementing efficient solutions. As a result, we collaborated with the internal executives, marketing, customer service, and technical delivery teams. We also worked with third-party design and usability agencies to ensure the best possible outcome.
The original website had evolved through continuous bespoke add-ons, which had resulted in challenges for the internal teams. There were challenges in relation to both back-end coding and front-end content updates. In addition, the platform build resulted in a poor user experience, with slow loading pages, difficulty in navigating the booking process, and a long journey to order completion.
Google Analytics demonstrated lower rankings compared to the competition, partly due to the slow loading times of heavily contented pages. Internally, the teams had difficulties in managing the regular changes required, having to rely on third-party developer assistance for a continuous flow of new ‘bolt-on’ functionality.
Forge Technologies helped the Premium Holiday Provider relaunch their website, CMS, and CRM systems to support the online sales booking business. Throughout the project, our approach was user-centric, with the aim to ensure an exceptional user experience and journey, with minimal clicks to discover, and maximise the conversion rate to sale. We also aimed to collate impactful insights for continuous improvement.
We worked with the marketing and design teams to agree upon the EpiServer platform, which offered additional analytical capabilities and UX, as well as the ability to integrate several cloud applications into one system for simplicity and streamlining. This resulted in a more effective and efficient platform for both internal and external users.
Alongside the new platform development and design, our team supported the in-house team with identifying and subsequently filling any skill set gaps that were identified. This ensured that the team had full autonomy of the new platform and development once
deployed.
Clearly, being a fully online business, bringing the new platform to fruition couldn’t be a stop-start process. We optimised the current platform for mobile use and facilitated content and update functionality as an interim until the launch of the new tech solution.
The Result
The newly developed platform boasts a market-leading, fast, and user-friendly design that requires fewer clicks to find locations, cabins, and relevant pricing information. This results in greater clarity and ease of navigation, making the customer journey more efficient and increasing the conversion rate and sales for the business.
The back-end CRM, payment gateways, cabin admin, and CMS are now integrated, allowing content, pricing, and product data to be collated in one database. This makes platform management and updates much easier, with all changes appearing in real-time across the system. Additionally, having one database of content eliminates the potential for duplication errors on both the customer interface and in the background.
The integration of the Azure Cloud Platform ensures easy and speedy deployment of coding updates without affecting the CMS content and allows for safe and secure extensions to the website without the need for third-party developer intervention. This also allows for scalability with ease and on-demand due to the cloud-based application agility.
The platform has shown a significant improvement in page performance with faster page loads thanks to strategic SEO. Additionally, the true user journey is now captured in much more detail, providing greater insight into visitor interactions.
The EpiServer CMS application allows the customer’s teams to fully configure key elements of the platform. This provides a rich content authoring experience that is integrated with the back-end systems, delivering ownership and flexibility. The application also enables marketing teams to make surface changes in real-time that appear on the platform with immediate effect.
