Life sciences leader transforms around digital

Since the 1970s, the client has been the leading supplier of restriction enzymes and other DNA-related products used in genomic research. Their worldwide headquarters is located on 140 acres of pristine conservation land north of Boston in Ipswich, Massachusetts. There, several hundred scientists support the development, manufacture and distribution of products to production and research facilities around the world.

Concentrix Catalyst partnered with the client on a multi-year project to completely redesign its digital experience, extend mobile tools to prospects and customers, replatform the website and complex product catalog onto Sitecore’s web content management platform, and integrate with a new ecommerce platform.

Challenge

Like many large organizations with legacy systems, the client reached the point where its proprietary technology platforms could no longer scale to meet the needs of the business. Even more critical, the digital properties weren’t providing the same level of customer experience and service that have been the hallmark of the client’s brand for the past 37 years.

The client was at an important inflection point. Competitively, they saw the need to grow mindshare, make the web the center of the client’s corporate strategy, and build a more sustainable technology platform that would serve as a foundation for future growth.

With a complex catalog of 1,500+ highly scientific products, the client also recognized the need to architect a content and data strategy that would provide a single source of “truth” across the organization, integrate with line of business applications, and empower scientists in the lab to make data changes.

The client partnered with us to develop the digital strategy and take an outside-in approach to understanding the role of digital through the lens of the client’s customers and prospects. This included replatforming onto a new, more modern CMS and crafting a strategy to better support the digital channel. Creating and publishing product data, as well as driving marketing, sales, customer support and service were paramount to the new digital strategy. In short, this would be a transformational project for the organization and its customers.

The client is loved by the scientific community and its customers, and their digital channel needed to build upon and extend this well-earned brand position. To thoroughly understand the client’s customer needs, the project teams conducted extensive primary research, including contextual interviews and an online survey querying over 750 users in all segments. “Over the years, I have learned to fully trust their products,” said one survey participant. “To me, they are to molecular biology enzymes, what Apple is to computers; they both make great products and I like using them.”

Secondary research included stakeholder discovery and alignment workshops, as well as industry, brand, and competitive research. Seven personas were created and prioritized from the research, including a task-based analysis that helped prioritize content, features, and the overall digital experience.

The customer insights helped inform a strategy that significantly shifted the product-centric content to offer expanded information needed by users, including how to plan and perform experiments. The new content also included more detail on the application of the products, to help scientists learn how best to use them.

Solution

We re-architected, redesigned, and replatformed the client website onto Sitecore and built a custom product management application focused on supporting these foundational elements:

• A custom-designed administrative interface with an author experience that allowed product managers, scientists and marketing folks to easily manage product data
• A content reuse strategy that allowed the client to change content in one place instead of dozens for making simple product changes.
• A content strategy to enable multi-faceted categorization and presentation of hundreds of product types and hundreds of options within those types
• A content model and structured data system that enforced data consistency across complex products
• Simplified workflow to streamline the publishing process

With the product data model and publishing workflow in place, the teams worked to integrate the site with a new ecommerce platform, the Google search appliance, and other custom applications, including dynamic charting and individual preference tools. The power of the new platform was not simply being able to store and manage all of this complex content, but to dynamically assemble content in the right context and deliver it to customers across many digital touchpoints.