Optimizely transforms Hyster Yale Group’s digital ecosystem

Hyster-Yale Group (HYG) is one of the world’s largest forklift truck manufacturers with global headquarters located in Cleveland, Ohio. HYG designs, engineers, manufactures, sells and services a comprehensive line of lift trucks and aftermarket parts. These are primarily marketed under the Hyster® and Yale® brand names. The business covers hundreds of end-user applications in more than 770 industries.

HYG wanted to create a more meaningful relationship with its customers, prospects, partners and dealers in a digital-first world and make it easier to do business with them. Product innovations within the area of lift trucks, such as IOT, robotics and automation, increase the complexity of HYG’s offerings, accelerating the need to move the offering from just the physical product (the lift truck) to more value-added solutions. With the market becoming more competitive in the solution-oriented area, HYG needed to reimagine its digital experiences to be able to communicate a more complex value offering and create a digitized buying journey for its customers.

HYG chose Optimizely’s customer success team to help refine and enhance the identity of the Hyster and Yale global brands in a Digital First world and leverage a common technology platform from which to build the two sites. This would enable the company to recognize customer journeys across the two brands but also distinguish them enough for clarity of which brand is more appropriate in which scenarios.

Optimizely began the engagement with an in-depth, ‘outside-in’ study of the two brands, harnessing insights from surveys and interviews to assess the market’s perception of their relative positioning.

This was complemented through a digital insights exercise that was able to assess the actual positioning according to the websites’ current messaging and semantics utilized. Understanding this positioning gap, while also assessing the competitive positioning outside of the two HYG brands, empowered Vertic to create a ‘Brand Eye’ strategy that defined the differentiation points and what they inferred for digital brands interpretation.

Optimizely’s extensive research continued to recognize subsequent content and functionality requirements at each stage of each brand’s customer buying journey, enabling HYG to recognize relevant aspects of the website build that could scale across the two brands while building out the content strategy. Together with the ‘Brand Eye’, this led to recommendations of new content or changes in content that aligned with each brand’s audience’s expectations of more solution-oriented information.

The UX and design of the two websites included the creation of a design system, which would enable scale of the web build by combining modules for the two companies’ web properties, with recommendations of cross-brand usage according to matching steps and need in the customer experience.

Optimizely’s Digital Experience Platform was used to create the two separate sites, Hyster.com and Yale.com which were built to scale with dynamic customisation, brand touchpoint and profile information and much better reflected the brands evolution.

Check out www.hyster.com and www.yale.com to see the results