TRANSFORMING WEB PRESENCE AND ENABLING BRAND STANDARDIZATION. HCL LEADS DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION INITIATIVE FOR THE WORLD’S LEADING FOOD SERVICES RETAILER.

CUSTOMER DESCRIPTIONThe company is the world’s leading chain of fast food restaurants headquartered in the United States.

BACKGROUND The customer was immensely challenged by managing and tracking its global brand presence across a myriad of communication channels - the key to maintaining its identity, which translates into customer acceptance, awareness and ultimately sales. The client’s global customer facing websites for different markets were managed by local creative agencies and marketing teams, each working in silos. These teams were fully depended on IT for any content creation/minor changes leading to longer cycle time for content launch with increased costs.

HCL Identified the following key technology challenges for the customer:

• Inconsistent branding and web experience

• Inconsistent technology landscape—the client teams built customer-facing websites using different tools, technology and methodologies

• Multiple providers used to host the websites and their content

• Lack of reusability and standardization

• High cost and time required to build and launch a website

• Legacy methods for creating new websites, or making any changes to the existing ones leading to loss of productivity and high costs

All these factors led to lack of standardization, increased complexity, low maintainability and usability, and a very high cost environment cost, with a heavy dependency on IT.

CUSTOMER BUSINESS OBJECTIVESThe customer’s key issue was managing and ensuring a uniform web presence. However, their marketing and brand teams were not integrated and worked in silos—there was no sharing of best practices or reusing of assets. Marketers spend a lot of time on day-to-day campaign operations rather than on more strategic brand building initiatives. This created a very complex web environment where creating, managing and hosting country specific websites was becoming very expensive.

Case Study

The customer was looking for a solution that would not only standardize their web presence but also empower their sales and marketing teams to manage it by themselves—end-to-end. Their key imperative was to eliminate the existing heightened dependence on IT for creating or editing of their websites across geographies, and thus saving on recurring costs and effort. They envisioned reusability and sharing as key tenets of their next-generation web publishing platform.

Their key business objectives were:

• Ensuring ‘Create Once, Use Many Times’—Reusable templates and components

• Enforcing consistent branding and corporate standards while providing local control to regional marketing teams

• Reducing the time, effort and cost to launch new brand websites by standardizing the on-boarding process using prebuilt templates and components

• Empowering its marketing team to manage campaigns on the web themselves, thereby eliminating the need for IT support

• Managing multilingual sites and delivering content across various channels

• Increasing the brand reach by integration with social media like Facebook, Twitter, etc.

• Improving collaboration between in-house marketing teams, creative, digital agencies and IT teams

• Providing enhanced visibility and control to the overall digital engagement and marketing process

HCL SOLUTION Based on a thorough understanding of the customer’s business and technology challenges, HCL, with its vast experience in the areas of digital marketing and web experience, was able to come up with the ideal solution—Digital Engagement Platform (DEP)—a one stop shop to address all the client challenges.

The Digital Engagement Platform (DEP) is the client’s enterprise wide solution for hosting customer facing websites. It provides a framework for developing re-usable capabilities to engage all of the client’s markets and customers in a modern and consistent way across multiple countries using industry standard tools and technologies.

The DEP is built upon an Adobe CQ5 Web Content Management System that allows business teams to take control of the marketing content, by creating and launching web sites utilizing available templates and components. The platform also leverages open source technologies such as Jboss application server, Tomcat web server, MySQL database and Apache SOLR search engine, which provides real time indexing and search capabilities. The client’s critical applications were also migrated to the DEP and integrated with the solution.

The platform also provided multi-channel delivery capabilities on desktop, mobile and tablet.

It provided a cost-effective and easy-to-maintain platform for the customer - to manage all its digital marketing activities, which included:

• Centralized digital engagement platform enabling:

– Web Content Management

– Enterprise Search

– CDN

– Web Trends/ Google Analytics

• A global website framework on DEP for desktop and mobile websites including:

– Global Templates

– Reusable Components

– Menu Management Integration

– Nutrition Administration

– Store Locator

– CRM and Analytics/ Search Dashboard

– Collaboration capabilities

• Social Media Integration with major social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter

• Social Aggregation with YouTube, Flickr and Lithium

• Multi-device/ browser compatibility

• GEO-specific regional settings

• Integration with packaging

The following infographic explains the Digital Engagement Platform:

BUSINESS BENEFITSHCL’s DEP offers customers a range of business benefits including:

• Integrated Solution: The DEP is a best-in-class ecosystem of integrated capabilities and global partners

• Cost savings: The solution is built on top of an enterprise-class Adobe Communique Web Content Management System and leverages mostly open source software like Solaris, Jboss, Apache SOLR, MySQL database etc. Hardware cost is also shared between different markets on-board the platform. The business functionality and capability is also shared across the business, providing economies of scale

• Speed to market: The tools and technologies used in the DEP allow markets to quickly launch mobile websites in multiple languages, without any involvement required from the IT teams

• Flexibility and empowerment: It allows the business to service itself for making website updates through the enterprise-wide Adobe Communique Content Management System (CMS) solution. The DEP also offers increased stability and high uptime

• Security: The solution provides a secure system, where security is integrated with the client’s security framework

• Brand consistency: The DEP enables brand consistency and helps ensure superior and uniform customer experience - beyond the barriers of geographies and languages

• Enhanced and efficient sharing: It facilitates the creation of a global repository for digital content and creative assets

• Reduced development cost -> 10-12k for smaller markets & 20-25k for larger markets

• 60-80% reduction in time to market for new websites

• 30-40% reduction in time to market for content changes

• Lower dependency on IT: With this solution, the customer can eliminate IT involvement in campaigns/ promotion updates and also reduce infrastructure and application support

Web Content Management

Enterprise Search CDN Web Trends/

Google Analytics

Digital Engagement Platform

ThemesCustomization

Envision and Architect a centralized digital

engagement platform

Develop Framework

Social Media Integration

Multi-device/browser compatibility

GEO specific regional settings

Integration with packaging

Multilingual

Social Aggregation

Preferences

Templates/ Components

Analytics/ Search Dashboard

Menu Mgmt. Integration Collaboration

CRM Store Locator

Hello, I’m from HCL!. We work behind the scenes, helping our customers to shift paradigms and start revolutions. We use digital engineering to build superhuman capabilities. We make sure that the rate of progress far exceeds the price. And right now, 90,000 of us bright sparks are busy developing solutions for 500 customers in 31 countries across the world. How can I help you?

www.hcltech.com

SUCCESS STORYThe DEP solution was widely adopted across multiple geos and is currently operating in over 16+ countries in 9 languages including Arabic and Chinese. More countries plan to adopt the platform in the coming years.

The solution:

• Provides 50+ reusable components

• Attracts 9 million visits per month, and 77 million views per month

• Supports over 50 promotional and marketing websites

• Is used by 10 creative agencies across the globe