CREATING THE GOLD STANDARD IN CX WITH OPTIMIZELY DXP

OPTIMIZELY’S CONTENT CLOUD ENHANCES CONTENT MANAGEMENT OPERATIONS

Rio Grande chose Optimizely’s Content Cloud to streamline their content operations. The system’s ability to handle complex business logic made it the perfect CMS platform for Rio Grande’s robust catalog and content updating needs. Their new site needs a high level of customization and flexibility to promote new products, improve useability and strengthen SEO.

To empower their team with a dynamic set of CMS tools, Guidance develops a library of fully-customizable templates and pre-built blocks they can use throughout the site. This solution makes content updates and site enhancements faster and easier without requiring developers.

REFRESHING THE RIO GRANDE BRAND WITH A PERSONALIZED APPROACH

Many jewelry makers see Rio Grande as a dependable and long-standing resource. Changes to their branding and communications strategy needed to maintain the essence of the Rio Grande brand. Changes to their long-standing logo need to be subtle.

Through small strategic tweaks, Guidance designers dropped the blue oval background and classic tagline before turning the text blue. The new logo looks more prestigious and powerful as it stands alone against the white background.

Rio Grande’s new site needs the ability to support multiple B2B customer accounts with different available features, pricing levels, and branding. Each customer tier makes development and implementation exponentially more complex.

This level of personalization demands creative solutions from a UX and technical perspective. A remarkable amount of business logic is needed to create a multi-level customer database inside a single site. The site’s ability to transition seamlessly between customer account segments empowers Rio Grande to deliver a truly personalized experience for their customers.

Most consumers buy from brands that align with their values and personality. Crafting empathetic messaging helps strengthen these essential customer connections. Their history as a family-owned business who strongly values their employees, social responsibility, and environmental causes now stands at the forefront of Rio Grande’s website.

The site reinforces camaraderie with main headers and sections displaying images of actual employees and jewelry makers from their community. These strategic solutions help Rio Grande communicate their core values to their customer base, build brand loyalty in digital environments and achieve a high level of personalization for customer segments.

LEVERAGING AZURE STORAGE QUEUE OPTIMIZES SYSTEM PROCESSES

SAP powers Rio Grande’s pricing, inventory, shipping rates, order fulfillment, metals prices, and customer data. To maintain the continuity of their data and workflow during the transition to the new site, they wanted to keep SAP for their enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM). This forces Guidance to integrate new platforms against pre-existing systems.

The problem with SAP is that certain functions (like creating an account or completing an order) can cause delays when done synchronously on the site, disrupting the user experience. To mitigate this disruption, offloading certain operations into a background process using Azure Storage Queue proved to be the best solution. These background processes also allow Rio Grande's website to handle transient or severe outages of SAP without damaging the user experience.

The SAP integration entails working closely with the Rio Grande team to understand data and business logic and perform end-to-end testing. Using Azure Storage Queue avoids synchronous SAP operations, improves site performance for the user, and dramatically enhances the system's resiliency.

UNIFYING DATA BETWEEN ENTERWORKS AND SAP ENHANCES SITE PERFORMANCE

Enterworks remained as Rio Grande’s product inventory management (PIM) system from their previous website. This part of the web redesign involves another custom integration against a pre-existing system. Enterworks maintains all of Rio Grande’s product catalog elements and synchronizes data daily. The SAP ERP system delivers pricing and inventory in a separate process. The challenge here is unifying all this data into Optimizely’s data model.

In this instance, Guidance designs processes to unify pricing and inventory from SAP to the remaining product data in Enterworks. Overlaying these two data sources optimizes the system so that its functionality works seamlessly regardless of the original data source. These site customizations show Guidance’s ability to implement against complex third-party systems while improving existing practices and functionality.