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Company Spotlight: Sitecore

Company Spotlight: Sitecore

Company Spotlight: Sitecore

Please introduce your company and tell us its USP?

Sitecore is the global leader in experience management software that enables context marketing. The Sitecore Experience Platform manages content, supplies contextual intelligence, automates communications and enable personalised commerce, at scale. It empowers marketers to deliver content in context of how customers have engaged with their brand, across every channel and in real-time,before, during and after a sale.

What is its strategic vision?

To revolutionise the relationship between businesses and customers through great digital experiences. We have the most extensible content management, digital marketing and commerce tools available through a connected platform that can scale.

What are doing in the ecommerce and multichannel market?

Unlike other vendors in this space, Sitecore helps create customers for life by enabling outstanding experiences, not just enabling transactions. Creating differentiation in today’s Amazon world means the ability to deliver contextualised, personalised experiences on any channel. However, brands are often challenged with separate systems that fragment the customer journey. Sitecore Experience Commerce is the only end-to-end cloud-enabled solution that creates seamless customer experiences by unifying content, commerce and contextual intelligence to incorporate shopping as a native part of the customer journey.

Tell us about the latest service that you have launched for your retail clients.

Sitecore Experience Commerce is our new integrated content, commerce and contextual marketing platform featuring state-of-the-art commerce architecture built on ASP.NET Core, which is the very latest Microsoft framework. Built to leverage all the benefits of Sitecore’s content management and digital marketing platform tools and workflows, it is unmatched in the industry, with the ability to deliver end-toend, personalised omnichannel shopping experiences to consumers. This release ships with a Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) Storefront, a production-ready site that comes with 40+ out-of-thebox commerce components. This templated UX approach speeds up time to market as it allows content teams to design, assemble and deploy web content, relieving IT teams of page-build responsibilities and so allowing them to focus on higher impact development initiatives. Sitecore Experience Commerce is available on-premise and in the cloud. We’ve partnered with Microsoft to provide a simple wizard-like experience in the Azure Marketplace so that you can deploy Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 on your own Microsoft Azure instance with just a few clicks, allowing customers to scale up or out to meet changing traffic demands easily.

How does this compare to what your competitors are doing?

Great content drives great experiences which, in turn, drives revenue. Unlike other vendors in the space, Sitecore began its journey as a content management platform. The future of commerce is not just about driving transactions but also about building customers for life through personalised, contextualised experiences. While our competitors are trying to catch up by bolting on content management capabilities, we have 15 years of experience as the recognised industry-leading content management solution. The integration of truly robust content management capabilities is the game changer for going beyond the transaction to build customers for life. In addition, unlike other ageing technology stacks, Sitecore Experience Commerce has been written on the latest ASP.NET Core technology from Microsoft, meaning that it’s a modern commerce infrastructure featuring pluggable extensibility and microservices based approach with opt-in complexity.

Who are your customers?

Sitecore’s commerce customers range from upper mid-market to enterprise retailers, CPGs and branded manufacturers. The long list includes such names as DOW, Toro, QNET, Ansys and Pet Supplies Plus.

What do you see as challenges in the coming year and what are you doing to meet those challenges?

I call it the Amazon effect. The greatest myth is that the battle for online retail is already over when it’s only just begun. Yes, there’s a major digital transformation under way, spurred on by innovation that’s happening in online marketplaces like Amazon and also from outside the retail industry via players such as Uber and Airbnb. As many savvy retailers realise, there’s a tremendous growth opportunity ahead for brands who can build value-added experiences above and beyond just a product assortment. We help customers digitally transform their business to become more relevant. As a concrete example, instead of presenting thousands upon thousands of product choices, we help present the most relevant choices based on an in-depth data-driven understanding of each customer. Brands can then remain engaged postsale by proactively providing value added content to deepen relationships beyond the singular transaction.

How do you see the ecommerce/multichannel industry developing in the longer-term future?

Brands will become increasingly challenged to make sense of the avalanche of data generated by their own systems, as well as third-party data made available to them. Sitecore has recently launched Sitecore Corte – a dedicated engine for processing machine learning algorithms at scale. This takes advantage of the opportunity to provide even more personalised experiences.

This Company spotlight was produced by InternetRetailing and paid for by Sitecore. Funding articles in this way allows us to explore topics and present relevant services and information that we believe our readers will find interesting as well as informative.

SITECORE IN BRIEF

Company name: Sitecore

Global reach: Active in more than 50 countries

UK Launch date: The company was founded in 2001

Customers: 5,200

Number of employees: More than 1,000

Partners: More than 1,400 solution partners globally

Contact details: info-emea@sitecore.net

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY

Homefashion Group is one of the largest suppliers of flooring, wallpaper, window treatments, lighting and furniture products in the Netherlands. The Dutch holding company recently embarked on a rebrand of Kwantum, its flagship company. With more than 100 stores and growing, Kwantum serves customers in the Netherlands and Belgium.

“We wanted to shift the perception of Kwantum from a seller of discount furniture to a leader in modern and inspiring home furnishings,” says Jeroen de Punder, Chief Marketing Officer, Homefashion Group. Part of the rebrand strategy involved redesigning and expanding Kwantum’s digital presence.

Prior to the rebrand, Kwantum had a basic website – essentially just an online product catalogue. It lacked original content, integration with social media and the ability to capture information about the customer journey. When it came to the user experience, it was one size fits all.

Homefashion Group wanted to create a personalised and authentic experience for visitors that would make shoppers feel understood and well served by the brand. But to do so, the company needed to understand the context of every consumer interaction with the brand, including knowing which web pages a consumer had visited, which emails they had opened, what products they had purchased and what devices they have used to view the website.

By integrating content and commerce, Homefashion Group now delivers a standout customer experience across all channels. It’s a strategy that has already paid off. Since deploying it, Kwantum has seen a 25% increase in online and offline visitors, as well as significant revenue growth and lower IT costs from using an integrated platform.

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