Project Description

An energy company that provides electricity, natural gas and solar products to nearly 800,000 residential and commercial customers needed a solution to decrease time-to-market for new or updated enrollment websites, which represent the client’s brands, from weeks to hours.

The Challenge

Building and maintaining a website is challenging enough – especially when you think about the different types of content necessary to call oneself “online”. This is not just limited to printed words and graphics, but also UI controls and deployment platforms. But when your business depends on managing MULTIPLE websites that drive customers and revenue, the entire process can be very daunting.

Our client, a rapidly growing energy management company, relies on the success of introducing and managing several enrollment websites for their family of brands. They execute new campaigns every month to capitalize on frequent national and state-based regulatory changes, and speed to market of these campaigns is critical for effectively acquiring revenue.

When the Chateaux team went behind the scenes to assess the process behind our client’s multi-channel marketing approach, it became clear that there was too much time spent on developing, finalizing, and implementing business requirements. There are 8-10 different teams involved when entering a new market, so coordination is key. However, web developers went back-and-forth multiple times to business leaders, which slowed execution of these campaigns to about 1-2 weeks per website.

Chateaux decided to use Sitefinity, a leading web content management system from Telerik (recently acquired by Progress Software), as the platform for the solution. Sitefinity comes complete with a full toolkit and wide array of features, further cementing it as a great web development platform. The toolkit includes (but is not limited to): a user friendly interface, super sleek design, Microsoft Visual Studio integration, built-in analytics trackers, and many other features.

Chateaux first deployed Sitefinity within the Microsoft Azure cloud environment, leveraging its PaaS capabilities. Chateaux then designed and tailored the Sitefinity platform to match the high rapid application development (RAD) standards at the client. The ability to modify specific areas of a website, such as regulatory terms, was centralized within the Sitefinity dashboard. Websites can be unpublished and republished with ease. Approvals on content for a new website and campaign is now also routed through the same Sitefinity interface, streamlining collaboration across multiple stakeholder groups. Creating and launching a new website, based on established templates and optimized for every major mobile device, can be achieved in as little as 2 hours. This includes real-time credit checks with Experian and web-based analytics collection for use in traffic optimization. All enrollment websites are deployed in the Azure cloud, and existing enrollment websites were also migrated to the Azure cloud.

The marketing team can manage the offers on each website with offer codes, and the support team can update a website without deep software coding experience. The Chateaux team also built a Customer Management application which is used by Call Center agents and business teams. In addition, workflow management capabilities to underpin content approval processes is planned for deployment by the end of 2015.

Through Sitefinity’s user-friendly interface, the client can now develop new enrollment websites and update their existing websites faster and much easier. This allowed the client’s stakeholders to optimize time spent working with developers and slash time-to-market. Content creators can also do their best work, show it off, and track the results through one seamless solution.

To-date, the client has 10 different websites which each focus on one of 10 brands and their respective enrollment processes. There are hundreds of thousands of users that visit each site on a regular basis. The client has also been able to partner with bigger brands to execute joint campaigns.

Chateaux’s implementation of Sitefinity at our client has streamlined the entire process of content publishing and analytics tracking. The client can now focus on what matters most: to confidently and openly interact with their customers in a fresh, easy, and intuitive manner.