Reducing infrastructure costs and improving the digital customer experience
Leveraging Sitecore to Drive Transformation for a Financial Services Leader
At a glance
CLIENT
A Global Investment Company
STRATEGIC PARTNER
- Sitecore
SERVICES
- CX+
- Engineering
INDUSTRY
- Financial Services
With customer expectations at an all-time high, a global investment company was looking to leverage its existing Sitecore ecosystem to improve customer experience. The client needed a knowledgeable partner with expertise in Sitecore to optimize its transformation to a modern, agile, digitally-enabled brand. The financial services leader turned to EPAM, a Strategic Global Sitecore Partner, to successfully implement Sitecore in a tight timeframe and manage ongoing support services. Through our partnership, the company has already reduced infrastructure costs by 33%.
FUTURE-READY CX+
Making the Most of Sitecore
Customers across every industry are quickly becoming more digitally proficient. This is particularly true in financial services, where customer expectations are sky high. Innovative companies understand that their digital experiences must be as engaging and as flexible as everything else they offer.
The client, a global investment company, offers the gamut of financial services — including planning services for individual customers; support for advisers via investment tools and technologies; and investment solutions for pension schemes, consultants, insurers, charities, foundations, universities, family offices and treasury managers.
To continue to deliver the best value and insight to its customers, the client was looking to deliver a digital experience that offers seamless user engagement and contextually relevant information to support the increasingly complex and varied needs of its customers.
To bring this vision to life, the client approached EPAM for help with:
- Creating a digital platform that meets both business and end user needs
- Supporting its Sitecore maturity and ensuring maximum investment in the platform
- Helping create a culture around digital and technology learning and sharing
- Fostering an engineering culture and helping embed best practices that future-proof the digital estate
The financial services leader has already seen a 33% reduction in infrastructure costs from the Sitecore implementation.
Optimizing Sitecore Now and for the Future
The client had launched a rebranding, which required the migration of dozens of multi-lingual websites — spanning several brands — on the Sitecore platform, in a relatively short timeframe. By supporting that migration, EPAM helped ensure a smooth re-branding transition globally.
Sitecore’s end-to-end, composable digital experience platform helps companies save time and money in the construction and maintenance of digital content. It allows marketers to create engaging, tailored online experiences for customers. By optimizing data, the platform makes the most of content and delivers an unparalleled customer experience.
As a Strategic Global Sitecore Partner, EPAM had the expertise required to advise the client on new Sitecore trends and features so the investment leader could maximize use of the platform, improve user experience and create a modern, future-proof technical architecture to minimize total cost of ownership. Moreover, the client knew we would bring additional value to the relationship by leveraging our financial services domain expertise, our engineering DNA and our robust methodology.
With this expertise, EPAM was able to help the client align its global web estate with the new digital web guidelines and standards associated with re-branding. In the near term, that allowed the client to align its online brand with its goals. In addition, we supported the client’s effort to align its Sitecore solution with best practices to help future-proof the platform for the long term.
Improving Implementation
A smooth implementation is key to driving business results, and to attracting and retaining customers. The client faced challenges from the original implementation, which had made it difficult to introduce new features and add or change content.
EPAM’s team of engineers, business analysts and solution architects worked in close collaboration with the client team to modernize its existing implementation, improving release cycles and time to market. Together, we implemented a roadmap of improvements that bolster the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
As part of our implementation improvements, we optimized Microsoft Azure cloud usage by introducing Azure SQL pools, migrating to recent versions of app services and reviewing the multi-region setup. EPAM established performance testing to ensure Sitecore would be reliable going forward and be able to handle the client’s requirements and expected load. EPAM also introduced development practices aimed at making the website accessible to all users irrespective of need.
The work we’ve undertaken to optimize Sitecore is an important step towards introducing a composable architecture. To enable a headless approach, we implemented Sitecore Javascript Services (JSS), which has increased flexibility, sped up development and decreased time-to-market. This headless solution means that the front-end user experience is completely decoupled from the back-end logic, allowing for total design freedom in creating the user interface and for connecting to other channels and devices. EPAM continues to support the client’s journey to a composable architecture, with pluggable, scalable and replaceable components that give the financial leader the freedom to choose the best tools on the market to meet the needs of the company and its customers.
Expanding Our Support
After six months of collaboration on the Sitecore implementation, the client asked if EPAM would also take over its Sitecore support services. In addition to our ongoing implementation efforts, we quickly ramped up a 24x7x365 managed shared services team.
The scope of our managed shared services work includes cloud infrastructure support, DevOps activities, “break and fix” issues and minor enhancements. This team is responsible for Sitecore incident management and resolution, health monitoring, proactive troubleshooting and application of Sitecore security patches, as well as management, deployment and testing of releases across all Sitecore environments. Service metrics and reporting are a standard part of the service.
Building a Better Digital Experience
Establishing engineering excellence practices on the project allowed faster development and improved quality engineering. And that means pages can be built and updated more quickly, to better connect with customers. The changes we made to the infrastructure resulted in cost savings and overall improved Sitecore performance for the client.
The client is now successfully using Sitecore to better understand the needs of its customers and build lasting relationships. As our partnership continues, EPAM will deliver continuous improvements and enhancements so that the financial services leader is always getting the best of Sitecore and its tech stack.
HEAR FROM THE CLIENT
“Collaborating with EPAM was the turning point in our Sitecore journey. Their expertise has helped ensure our website is robust and performant while at the same time reducing our operating costs and delivering great value from the partnership.”
Head of Digital Marketing Solutions
TECH STACK
PARTNER WITH US
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