Scaling Multi-Site Experiences for Accelerated Growth
Due to tremendous business growth, ConnectWise needed to modernize and improve their digital experience across multiple websites, while building powerful efficiencies to empower their internal teams.
.svg)
Scaling Multi-Site Experiences to Support ConnectWise's Tremendous Growth
Due to tremendous business growth, ConnectWise needed to modernize and improve the digital experience across multiple websites, while building powerful efficiencies for their internal teams.
Check Out Our Results
Who
ConnectWise, established 42 years ago as a small managed service provider, has evolved into the world's leading software company.
Today, ConnectWise is a major enterprise - operating in 8 countries with a team of 3,100 employees.
Deeply dedicated to the success of IT solution providers, ConnectWise's robust capabilities in cybersecurity and IT solutions helped prevent 1.4 million security incidents.
Between 2018 and 2022, ConnectWise experienced significant and rapid growth. As widespread digital adoption drove more businesses online, they turned to ConnectWise for cybersecurity and IT solutions.
To best support their growing customer base, ConnectWise expanded by acquiring companies, creating new software, and increasing staff – growing from ~1800 employees in 2018 to more than 3100 employees in 2022.
Skyrocketing business growth is the dream, but brings new challenges.
To continue to best serve their customers and employees, ConnectWise needed to integrate multiple websites, content, brands, and technology stacks into a cohesive digital experience for their customers, while empowering their internal teams to better manage the large volume of multisite content.
Achieving Scalable Growth, Now and Beyond
"We are particularly excited about the forward-thinking solutions Whereoware is implementing," explains Steve Foster, Senior Web Strategy Manager at ConnectWise. "These innovations promise to significantly ease the workload for us and our colleagues, enhancing everything from content updates to the integration of future new sites and brands."
ConnectWise chose Whereoware as their customer experience partner for their digital transformation.
ConnectWise was struggling with multiple, disconnected web properties:
- informational corporate website
- conference and event website
- marketplace website for customers (app exchange to purchase additional tools and software)
This disconnect created challenges across the customer journey and for the internal teams responsible for publishing across sites.
Whereoware set out to understand ConnectWise’s fragmented customer experiences and enable their non-technical team to self-sufficiently manage complicated content creation, updates, and distribution.
Our Strategic Approach
First, Whereoware is actively integrating ConnectWise's multiple platforms into a cohesive, seamless experience for both internal users and customers.
Previously built on Sitecore, Whereoware migrated the multi-sites to Optimizely CMS 12 (Optimizely One, formerly Episerver). Optimizely CMS 12 is a powerful platform, making it easy for teams to manage multi-branded websites and scale for future business growth.
The new websites are designed with ConnectWise's internal team members in mind – enabling users to easily implement significant changes, without the need for technical developers.
Mike Kovach, Senior Digital Sales Executive at Whereoware explains, “Our goal is to empower ConnectWise and their non-technical teams to own what is happening across their digital experiences – to be able to look at the journey and impact it, without relying on technical developers to make changes.”
Building Customer Journeys + Personalization
With multiple websites, many customer types, and a huge array of IT products and solutions, ConnectWise's teams are navigating complex customer journeys – similar to optimizing a spider's web of diverse paths.
Their central question? How can we enhance our customers’ journey, while upselling and cross-selling in nonintrusive ways?
The customer conversion process at ConnectWise is multifaceted and data-driven, with customers requesting on-demand or live demos, initiating live chats, and scheduling meetings with sales representatives.
Factors like the user's location, country, and time of day play a crucial role in real-time routing to the appropriate sales support teams.
Whereoware started with a comprehensive customer audit to understand the different customer journeys. From there, they strategized ideas to streamline journey paths and deliver relevant solution information at the right moment.
The customer journey audit:
- Analyzed the unique journeys users take through each site.
- Identified user actions, motivations, and pain points.
- Built a blueprint for laying out content and guiding exploration through the website for quicker access to the information customers need, reducing their search time.
By gaining a 360-degree view of the customer, ConnectWise can unlock personalized experiences tailored to their customers' needs and maximize every opportunity for cross-selling.
For instance, when a customer browses ConnectWise’s marketplace website, automation rules identify which technologies they own, enabling ConnectWise to guide the customer down a pre-defined discovery journey toward a different product.
This strategy makes it easy for customers to discover new products, while driving cross-sell by intelligently recommending complementary technologies.
The next step - increasing speed to market.
The Accelerator Engine: Automating 10000+ Mouse Clicks
To create unparalleled efficiency and standardization across ConnectWise's multi-sites, Whereoware developed a custom Accelerator for Optimizely CMS.
Whereoware’s Optimizely CMS Accelerator is a powerful template engine, empowering marketers to quickly and efficiently create on-brand, stylized web layouts and blocks in a few clicks.
Untapped Efficiency and Consistency with the Accelerator
Whereoware's Accelerator goal is to solve for three experiences: developers, content authors, and customers.
The Accelerator acts as a theme engine to easily pull in conditional layouts and blocks. This allows each site admin to control specific design layouts and color palettes - and share them across other ConnectWise websites to expedite front-end development, content authoring, and overall brand consistency and control.
Content marketers never have to build a page from scratch - they can quickly curate admin-approved content layouts per page type, replete with template-specific blocks, brand styles, color palettes, personalization rules, and more, on-the-fly.
The Whereoware Accelerator enables seamless updating across multiple sites and pages. It's a huge time saver for developers and marketers alike.
Key benefits of the Accelerator:
- Enhanced user experience for content creators
- Streamlined development processes
- Improved consistency in design
- Simplified multisite management
- Increased flexibility in authentication methods
Whereoware Accelerator In-Action
Let's say ConnectWise needs to change product pricing - should be easy, right?
With ConnectWise's previous multisite complexity, their marketer might have to update 38 product pages and 700-800 individual web blocks, translating to an overwhelming 12,000-15,000 mouse clicks.
This not only required an immense amount of time, but increased the risk of inconsistencies and errors. With the Whereoware Accelerator, these extensive updates are a thing of the past.
Now, a single edit on the site is propagated universally, automatically updating all relevant blocks. What used to be a multi-hour project can now be completed in under an hour.
This internal efficiency not only saves valuable time, but ensures uniformity across all digital experiences, a crucial factor for maintaining brand integrity in a multi-site environment.
Technology Integrations
ConnectWise’s custom digital transformation built by Whereoware integrates Optimizely One (digital experience platform), Marketo (marketing automation software), and Salesforce (Data Cloud), creating a robust data ecosystem.
Integrating these tools ensures seamless data synchronization across different platforms – enhancing overall operational efficiency and delivering a cohesive view of all customer interactions to improve marketing and customer engagement quality.
Data synchronization also fuels intelligent routing, cross-selling, and upselling strategies. By embracing advanced technology, strategic data management, personalized customer experiences, and targeted marketing, ConnectWise solidifies continuous success and growth in an increasingly competitive market.
Beyond the Solution: A Look Towards the Future
ConnectWise's journey with Whereoware is far from over. As the final pieces of the puzzle come together, ConnectWise is looking forward to launching their improved site in early 2024.
