How Pepper Group personalized and tested with our DXP

Pepper Group Limited (Pepper) approached the market to identify an Enterprise digital experience management solution to replace their existing CMS and web platform.

The Challenge

The business had a team of seven in-house developers supporting the three-year old system through iterative cycles of enhancements and maintenance efforts. One of the main objectives for the new platform, was to simplify the enhancement process. The solution also had to provide equivalent functionality, while streamlining the authoring process for content editors.

The new solution required existing compatibility and pre-built integration with Salesforce CRM and Salesforce Marketing Cloud marketing automation, along with the ability to deliver an authenticated broker portal to supply access to specific content and tools.

It has been remarkable that we have essentially built three years of capability in three months.

Gary Boyd

Head of Digital, Pepper Group

The Solution

Pepper evaluated a number of vendors and selected Optimizely's Digital Experience Platform service for CMS and marketing due to the platform's full compliance with Pepper's requirements, approach to integration with the broader digital ecosystem, and some other differentiating features. 

As Pepper's previous CMS was hosted and managed by a partner agency, they initially considered a third-party hosting provider; however, concerns around de-centralized responsibility and additional effort to manage all parties involved led them to instead consider the Digital Experience Cloud - a PaaS offering that is full managed and hosted by Optimizely. 

The customer felt that the PaaS offering would reduce the number of partners involved in the project and guaranteed them stable and robust performance. The scalable infrastructure was something that they felt differentiated Optimizely, as well as the diminished requirement for infrastructure across their global operations in UK, Ireland and Australia.

The benefits they identified included:

• A single vendor for both application and hosting
• Elastic scaling of resources when visitor numbers fluctuate
• A Dev/Ops capability that could be leveraged for their development
• The Azure web-apps architecturefor improvements in security and vulnerability management
• Guaranteed SLA for uptime and performance

The Result

As a challenger brand in many of their markets, Pepper sees Digital and Customer Experience as a key differentiator for its brokers and customers. Pepper selected Optimizely for many of the leading capabilities that they believe will support their ambitions with acquistion, improve customer and broker service and allow them to engage with their stakeholders. In particular, leading capabilties included:

• Optimizely Personalization, to deliver relevant and contextual content and information
• Optimized content for mobile experiences
• Optimizely Find, to improve the on-page search experience and surfacing of relevant content
• Optimizely AB Test, to optimize digital marketing conversion
• Simplified authoring for campaigns and landing pages