Elevate Customer Experience with Acquia Site Factory by Decoupling Site-Building from Feature Development
In today’s fast-paced world, marketers, technology executives and web administrators must move at the speed of business to improve time-to-market. So, when an idea strikes or a brand needs to shift, they cannot wait for their web presence to catch up. This is especially true for organizations with evolving brands and frequently updated web content.
To keep up with current content and web demands, many companies are using Acquia Site Factory (Site Factory) to enable any user to create, update and launch compelling web content at an accelerated rate. In this blog, I’ll share some of the key benefits of Site Factory and a few real-world use cases.
One Platform, Many Benefits
Accelerate Time-to-Market
For the modern web, Site Factory accelerates time-to-market by decoupling site building and content entry from platform functionality development. Decoupling enables content and marketing teams to create new sites and content with the click of a button, without intervention from their technical team. This allows the technologists to focus on feature enhancements, platform improvements and rigorous testing of new functionality to increase overall system stability and improve the customer experience.
Perform Tasks Faster in One Place
Site Factory’s single code base enables users to make and test updates in one place and then apply them to all the sites on the platform. A single code base also allows technical teams to apply code updates, test and validate code and deploy code platform-wide. This streamlines the update process and enables new and existing sites to benefit immediately from updates while reducing the cost of maintenance and downtime. These streamlined updates enable content editors to focus on the creation of new content and frees up budget for new site features and enhancements.
While relying on a single code base may sound troubling, Site Factory provides the best of both worlds when it comes to multisite management. Although the managed sites share a common code base from which they draw their functional components, each site still retains its own individual content and configuration at the database level, ensuring content edits or configuration changes to one site will not negatively impact other sites on the platform. This also ensures security and stability while giving content editors the permissions they need to get their jobs done.
Enhance Customer Experience
For organizations that have strict brand standards, consistency is the key to creating a customer experience that defines your brand and drives customer loyalty. Site Factory enables you to build sites with reusable elements and styles, which improves organizational consistency and elevates user experience across brands. It can even integrate with digital asset management (DAM) software and component libraries to increase efficiency and always ensure the best customer experience. DAM software and component libraries help keep assets consistent, organized and ready for reuse.
In addition, component libraries provide site builders across an organization with components whose design and functionality have been thoroughly tested and pre-approved for use. Being able to use these components on all platform sites ensures a consistently smooth customer experience and enables new components to be developed. Imagine if an asset or component has been updated due to a bug, compliance issue or someone needing a new multicolumn layout. With Site Factory, you can simply update the asset or component in the source tool, and the change is automatically reflected platform-wide on all sites.
Overall, Site Factory enables scalable, consistent and reliable site building for organizations across all geographies, languages and brands. It eliminates duplicate efforts, helps you share core site functionality and enables any user to create new sites with ease. Site Factory can unify your organization’s web properties and provide internal teams with the tools they need for rapid growth. With Site Factory, the possibilities for implementation are truly limitless.
Real-World Examples
Let’s look at a few relevant examples of how Site Factory can help organizations achieve ROI. Consider your favorite sport. For me, it’s baseball. Now, think of all the teams in the league. Wouldn’t it be easier to launch a new team website or push a new feature to all the team sites if they all shared a web platform? It would enable you to create new team sites with shared building blocks and a similar structure in mere minutes. Consistency is also a benefit here. For example, if a team asked for a new feature for its website, having the ability to share that new feature with other teams would be beneficial and cost effective. Site Factory provides all this functionality to enhance an organization’s digital platform and maximize its efficiency. Now, let’s explore two real-world examples from our partners at Acquia.
Acquia shows what Site Factory can do through the work they have done with the Archdiocese of Boston. Site Factory was used to align hundreds of disparate sites and consolidate the Archdiocese’s digital strategy and infrastructure, thus cutting costs while creating a robust Digital Experience Platform (DXP).
In the medical and pharmaceutical space, EPAM and Acquia implemented Site Factory for Otsuka Pharmaceutical to provide a shared platform and consistent process for launching new brand websites and portals for both consumers and healthcare providers. By enabling improved workflows for both development and content updates that allowed for easier code maintenance, faster and more predictable time-to-market for new sites and more compelling brand content, Otsuka achieved the following results: increased page views, a significant decrease in visitor bounce rate and vastly improved website performance, including home page load times.
The Impact of Your Web Presence
In closing, let me leave you with this quote: “In the U.S., 59% of consumers will walk away after several bad experiences, 17% after just one bad experience.” In most cases, your organization’s web presence is the first interaction with your customers, which means it is vital to provide a quality and consistent experience at all times. Through Site Factory, you have the power to build a platform of scalable, high-quality components and infrastructure to leverage across all your digital touchpoints, ensuring a consistently positive customer experience.
