MAGENTO PWA HEADLESS POWERS ONLINE LEARNING

Custom Coupon Solution

Guidance implemented a customized coupon solution for The Great Courses within Magento 2’s checkout. At various times of the year, courses will be discounted and customers are given coupon codes to redeem at checkout. The custom functionality works atop Magento’s out of the box coupon redemption engine. The Great Courses have specific rules around how their coupons are applied for their business and Guidance helped to develop business logic to support the solution.

Lightning Fast Media Delivery with Akamai

Customers of The Great Courses require a robust platform that is as reliable as it is resilient to stream seamless content directly from their mobile device or desktop. Akamai offers massive scale and unparalleled performance coupled with the capacity to deliver the largest media streaming services to The Great Courses. As users stream their courses, a seamless experience with zero buffering is paramount. Akamai offers flawless delivery with near-zero latency to optimize performance, reduce costs and ensure secure and quality experiences at scale. Guidance helped The Great Courses gain the agility needed to easily deploy changes, reduce their time to market and ensure quality and reliability.

New Revenue Channels

As customers stream their videos, The Great Courses continues to collect useful information to provide recommendations for their next lessons. They also use this information to offer discounts on related courses.

One way they connect with their customers is through personalized text messaging powered by Attentive. Using real-time behavioral data, Attentive’s SMS platform helps The Great Courses engage their mobile audience by sending useful and timely messages relevant to subscribers’ preferences and chosen topics. With Attentive, The Great Courses can reach millions of customers and start driving incremental revenue in minutes. They’ve also implemented transactional text messaging to keep customers who’ve ordered physical copies of their courses up to date on shipping estimates.

The Great Courses can create truly engaging text messaging campaigns by incorporating rich media and video snippets. Subscribers can respond and interact with customer service agents directly through text messaging. And using Attentive’s integrations with customer help desks, The Great Courses can automatically answer frequently asked questions by customers, saving their team countless hours and improving the customer experience at the same time.  

Seamless Data Migration

A large part of the replatform from Magento 1 to Magento 2 consisted of migrating the existing customer information to ensure a seamless transition. The migration was a two-step process that happened in tandem to ensure continuity of data: customer information had to remain intact and customer viewing data had to be transferred over to the new platform. Guidance helped The Great Courses migrate over 5 million records to Magento 2 which included customer information, wishlist data, prior purchases, browsing history along with many other data points. Given the over 15,000 courses available, the migration of customer viewing history and the ability to continue watching where customers had left off required complex manipulation. The entire migration had to be seamless with zero downtime and without impact to the end customer.

Certona Delivers Relevant Results

The Great Courses relies on sophisticated A/B testing and AI-driven personalization to delight its customers with impactful experiences that result in increased engagement, conversions and lifetime value. Every single action a user takes on the website is measured and tracked to provide relevant results to the audience segments based on behavior and context. Machine learning optimizes the content that is shown, the messaging and the discounts provided to the customer. Given the scale and size of the digital library, it was absolutely imperative that all product recommendations be powered through automation and algorithmically driven suggestions. Guidance ensures The Great Courses provides its customers with recommendations that are meaningful to them and therefore results in higher conversions.

Accessibility for All Customers

The Great Courses is committed to providing digital courses through every stage and at every learning level--this includes accessible material to the visually impaired. In order to offer the best accessible learning experience for their customers, The Great Courses chose AccessiBe to power their adaptive website. Guidance helped The Great Courses integrate AccessiBe’s website accessibility solution to offer a comparable user experience to the visually impaired.

AccessiBe’s AI is responsible for handling the more complex accessibility adjustments such as screen-reader optimization and keyboard navigation. Prior to AccessiBe, those modifications could only be achieved manually, with long, complex and costly development. Website visuals are simple for a sighted user to follow the flow of a site but a visually impaired user is unable to navigate in the same way a sighted user would browse. AccessiBe’s interface offers multiple, seamless customization options as all accessible portions become part of the website experience.

POWERFUL RATINGS & REVIEWS

The Great Courses has built out a community of devoted fans who evangelize their personal experiences with online learning. One of the best ways for customers to spread the good word is through customer ratings and written reviews. Guidance helped The Great Courses integrate BazaarVoice Reviews to allow customers to leave honest reviews of their experience with the courses. It has given customers the opportunity to engage with the community of fellow e-learners looking not just for excellent learning experiences but also to be part of a broader online community.

Reviews have a strong influence on customers during their online journey and this is even more important with digital content. Bazaarvoice empowers customers to buy confidently by collecting authentic, “voice of the customer” content and displaying it during the customer buying journey. Bazaarvoice gives customers the ability to generate their own reviews and provide additional information about their learning format and experience level. Customers feel confident in reading the reviews as authentic reviews are given a “Verified Purchaser” badge and customers can easily find reviews through advanced sorting and filtering options.