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SCALING IN THEERA OF DIGITALACCELERATION
TABLE OF CONTENTS04EXPANDING CAPABILITIESIs your site equipped to meetemerging CX needs?0811Automatically scale to meetunpredictable demandMore websites shouldn’t createmore problems1619HANDLINGTRAFFIC INCREASESSCALING EMPLOYEEEXPERIENCEEMPLOYEECOMMUNICATIONRedefining internal communicationand engagementIs your intranet built for aremote workforce?CREATINGNEW PROPERTIESLEARNING SERVICESOnboarding and professionaldevelopment reimaginedSCALIN G C X A N D E X142
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY3Why Scale Is So Critical TodayThe COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the speedand scope of digital transformation across everyindustry. With so many transactions and interactionsnow taking place online, customer experience isnow primarily digital.Whatever your particular challenge, you needto be able to scale efficiently. In this e-book, wewill look at some common scaling scenarios andshow what companies have done to addressthem successfully.SCALING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCEWhen it comes to scaling digital properties tosupport CX, companies generally need to doone or more of the following:Expand the capabilities on their website(s)Handle traffic increases on their website(s)and applicationsCreate additional websites or applicationsSCALIN G C X A N D E XTo support the digital customer journey, yourenterprise will need to scale in one of severalways, depending on where you are in your digitaltransformation journey. Do you need to handle moretraffic on your primary website? Do you need tobuild a new web application like a customer portalbecause you can’t visit them in person? Do youneed to create more sites and deliver more dynamiccontent? Do you need to ramp up employeecommunications and/or employee learning?The two main categories of what you need toscale are your customer experience (CX) andyour employee experience (EX). The good news:The same platform can be used to scale both.
4SECTION 01EXPANDINGCAPABILITIESSCALIN G C X A N D E XIs your site equipped to meetemerging CX needs?
5THE PROBLEMTo meet growing customer demandfor a convenient experience,companies must reimagine theircustomer experience, whichrequires new capabilities. You mayhave to enhance your websiteand applications with commerce,advanced analytics or customerservice capabilities, such as chatbots. You may also need to enablecustomer engagement through morechannels, providing customers withthe same experience they expectfrom the brand wherever they may be.THE SOLUTIONLow Code: If you are going toprovide more content resourcesfor customers and prospects,you need to be able to addmore content to your site quicklyand easily.Personalization: If you wantyour site to be more dynamic,personalizing the experience fordifferent customers, you needpersonalization tools.Open APIs: If you want to interactwith customers across the entirecustomer journey, you need tointegrate more channels into yourdigital footprint.Machine Learning: If you wantto understand user behaviorsand site performance, you needadvanced analytics capabilities.Integrated DevelopmentEnvironment (IDE): And toactually add and integratethese capabilities into yourdigital properties, you needpurpose-built developer tools.SCALIN G C X A N D E XLooking at this through a customerexperience lens, we can say that forevery emergent customer experienceneed, there is an underlying capabilityor set of capabilities that you need:Commerce: If you are going totransact business on your site, youneed e-commerce capabilities.
To make it possible for more stakeholders to addcontent to your site, you need tools that are botheasy to use (because not all content contributorsare technically savvy) AND feature the robustsecurity enterprise sites require. To make it easy toadd new functionality to your site – e-commerce,video, analytics, etc. – you need a low-code sitebuilder tool that lets non-technical people add newpages and content, while enabling IT to maintainsecurity and compliance.SCALIN G C X A N D E XWith a low-code, visual interface and dragand-drop page creation, you don’t have to be adeveloper or have extensive knowledge of codingto create rich, immersive websites. People withminimal coding skills, which may include designers,marketers and line of business specialists, caneasily build, edit and manage the websites theywork with. These sites can be built in weeks — notmonths — with minimal developer input.6
CASE STUDYKING ARTHUR BAKING7King Arthur Baking is the country’s oldest flour company. Due to arenewed interest in home baking brought about by the pandemic,traffic to the venerable brand’s site has reached an all-time high:website sessions are up 260% and e-commerce sales have increased200% year over year.Far more people were at home and in need of new baking-relatedcontent. King Arthur’s website did feature 2,000 baker-tested recipes,but the company also needed a new, content-driven web experienceto add capabilities to better engage this rising tide of visitors.SCALIN G C X A N D E XWith its digital agency partner Third and Grove, Acquia helped KingArthur Baking build and deliver a new content-driven experience thatsupported the company’s mission to be the ultimate resource andinspiration in the kitchen. With Acquia Drupal Cloud, King Arthur wasable to tightly integrate content and commerce so their marketingteam could quickly set up new recipe pages, highlight key informationand direct consumers to the right products to buy. For example, inonly a few weeks, they were able to launch a weekly show, “IsolationBaking Show,” with 100,000 weekly viewers. Content creators fromall sorts of work environments can now add content and videos dailywithout developer or engineering help.
8SECTION 02HANDLINGTRAFFIC INCREASESSCALIN G C X A N D E XAutomatically scale to meetunpredictable demand
THE PROBLEMTHE SOLUTIONNow that the buyer’s journey hasgone digital, your site has to managemore and more traffic. Customerexpectations for web performanceare as high now, if not higher, as theyhave ever been. Since so many morecustomers are engaging with brandsonline, brands need to be able tohandle unprecedented levels oftraffic without any glitches.In order to scale to absorb trafficsurges and provide all visitors witha consistent experience, your siteneeds to be built for it.SCALIN G C X A N D E XWhat complicates matters is thatsites are no longer static; they aredynamic, personalized experiencesmeant to serve different devicesand modalities for more impactfulcustomer engagement.Sites built on Drupal, a proven,enterprise-grade contentmanagement system (CMS), alreadyrely on an architecture built for scale,with thousands of proven modulesstress-tested for performance.However, this architecture alsoneeds to be hosted on a platformthat can automatically scale to meetdemand. Such a platform shouldalso provide monitoring and securitycapabilities so that emergent issuescan be addressed in a timely fashionand traffic surges don’t turn intosecurity incidents.9
CASE STUDYNEW YORK STATE10As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the nation, millions of peoplesuddenly had to rely on digital technology to work, communicate and stayinformed. The State of New York quickly recognized the need to expandtheir digital presence.In March 2020, New York State’s internal technical teams leveraged theAcquia Digital Experience Platform (DXP) to launch and manage newsites, scale their infrastructure and accommodate the massive influx oftraffic to their web properties. Thanks to the use of Acquia Site Factory,the state was able to spin up the coronavirus.health.ny.gov informationalsite within just three days!Thanks to Drupal and Acquia, government agencies could fulfill theirmission by rapidly and reliably communicating crucial information to thepublic. Through a total combined 25,000 hours of work performed bythousands of organizations and volunteers, New York State’s COVID-19response initiative yielded 49 million service interactions and 342 millionpage views across 60 million users.SCALIN G C X A N D E XAcquia Site Factory was also used to scale up New York’s Departmentof Labor website to meet the high demand from state residents lookingfor information on unemployment insurance benefits. Acquia’s accountmanager and technical account management team assisted withmodernizing digital resources across the Department of Labor site andkept everything running even as the department experienced a morethan 200% increase in total site traffic.
11SECTION 03CREATING NEWPROPERTIESSCALIN G C X A N D E XMore websites shouldn’tcreate more problems
THE PROBLEMBuilding, maintaining and optimizingmultiple sites is challenging. Thesechallenges get compounded whenyou have different types of sitesmanaged by different platformsand teams – a corporate website,an e-commerce site, event sites, anintranet, microsites, content hubs,etc. – that don’t scale well or supporteasy integration.THE SOLUTIONExpanding a brand’s digital presenceor scaling a diverse brand ecosystemrequires seamless management of agrowing portfolio of sites and digitalproperties, including corporatewebsites, campaign sites, customerportals and so on. If you’re a largeenterprise with multiple brandsin multiple regions, you need aunifying solution that offers bothcomprehensive visibility and toolsfor acting on multiple sites at once.You’ll also need to easily createversions of your sites at a localmarket level, so your solution mustprovide enough flexibility to supportstylistic differences between sites,while simultaneously maintainingbrand consistency.SCALIN G C X A N D E XScaling to maintain a consistentcustomer experience can, as wementioned, call for expanding abrand’s digital footprint. Of course,geographical expansion andacquisitions also involve launchingor updating multiple sites acrossmultiple regions. Whatever thebusiness reason for creating them,these new sites must all feature thecapabilities – content, e-commerce,personalization, etc. – yourcustomers have come to expect.And they must do so consistently,maintaining all relevant brandstandards. Naturally, these sitesmust also be secure and compliantwith any pertinent regulations, localand international.12
CASE STUDYNESTLÉ PURINANestlé Purina is a 90-year-old pet foodcompany dedicated to promoting petnutrition and conducting industry-leadingresearch on animal well-being.Purina wanted to enhance its digitalpresence, go to market faster, increasemarketing agility and emphasize consumercentricity. Doing so called for centralizingthe management of all 79 brand sites,building them on a common code baseand making sure security and complianceconcerns were reliably addressed.Finally, Purina has found that being able toleverage modules created by the Drupalcommunity allows them to add featuresand functionality to their web propertieswithout having to build things themselves.Saving time on the development front hasallowed Purina’s web team to focus on otherinnovations, features and technologies thatwould benefit the organization.SCALIN G C X A N D E XWith over 79 different brands in thePurina portfolio, the company maintaineda very complex digital presence. Having79 websites built 79 different waysmeant Purina was spending a lot of timereinventing the wheel. Best practices withrespect to things like user experience (UX)and SEO could not be standardized andshared. Worst of all, getting the differentunits that managed these sites on the samepage was impossible.In partnership with Nerdery, Purinaleveraged Acquia Site Factory to bringall their sites together onto a commonplatform with a common codebase. Thissaved the company a tremendous amountof time and resources and eliminatedmuch inefficiency. Purina can now publishcontent much more quickly and use a singleteam to do it. They can swiftly spin up newpages and pass compliance scans in amatter of days instead of weeks. They canalso apply proven best practices globally,easily updating practices or applying newpractices as needed.13
14SECTION 04SCALINGEMPLOYEEEXPERIENCESCALIN G C X A N D E XRedefining internal communicationand engagement
LEARNING AND COLLABORATIONMUST GO ON15In the COVID era, as with customer experience,the employee experience has become increasinglydigital – in some cases totally digital. This poses itsown unique challenges, particularly when it comesto onboarding and training new employees. Manycompanies have had to reimagine these processesjust as they have had to reimagine customerengagement. More broadly, these companieshave had to rethink the management of employeecommunications when the workforce has towork remotely.SCALIN G C X A N D E XAs we’ll discuss, many of the capabilities that helpcompanies scale digitally to meet customer needscan also be applied to scaling to meet the uniqueneeds of employees.
16SECTION 05EMPLOYEECOMMUNICATIONSCALIN G C X A N D E XIs your intranet built for aremote workforce?
THE SOLUTIONWith so many people working fromhome, consistent and comprehensiveemployee communication requiresa robust company intranet. Intranetscan improve collaboration, facilitatefaster information sharing andsupport employee cohesion. Amongother things, a well-structuredintranet can provide easy access todocuments, media files and otherimportant content.Luckily, there are highly scalable,secure and fully managed cloudplatforms that can be used forinternal content and websites justas effectively as for customer-facingones. These solutions provideenterprises with the secure contentarchitecture and connectivity theyneed to optimize communicationand productivity across newlydistributed workforces.However, many companies eitherdon’t have an intranet, or they haveone designed for a different era.Before the COVID-19 pandemic,work-from-home policies variedgreatly from company to company,with many treating it more like aprivilege than a necessity. Intranetsassumed an on-site workforce andwere often little more than glorifiedfile servers. With intranets becominga critical component of the internalcommunications infrastructure,companies have had to reengineertheir intranet or put one in place,sometimes for the first time.When you can manage andupdate all of your sites andapplications from a singlecodebase, platform maintenanceand governance becomes effortless.From a single, centralized console,roles can be assigned to users,defining what they can and can’tdo on the team’s applications andenvironments. These roles are alsoeasily customizable to match yourworkflow and business needs.17SCALIN G C X A N D E XTHE PROBLEM
CASE STUDYBDO ALLIANCE USA18BDO Alliance USA is a nationwide association of independently owned localand regional accounting, consulting and service firms. The Alliance allowsmember firms to access BDO resources and expand services to their clients,all without jeopardizing existing client relationships or their autonomy.The Alliance Portal, a private, Drupal-based platform, is the resource hubfor members of the BDO Alliance USA. Over the years, the portal evolvedfrom a document-based Sharepoint system to a dynamic marketing tool. Butas the BDO Alliance Program collected more and more data, it strained theportal’s capabilities and functionality suffered, particularly when it came tosite search.Acquia Cloud Platform provided BDO’s portal with the capacity to handle25,000 users and the flexibility to scale without limit in the future. Searchis now highly optimized, making it fast and easy. Users can also searchover 7,500 CPE courses and sessions needed to build their professionalknowledge base and fulfill licensing requirements.With Acquia Cloud Platform, BDO increases the value of the Allianceprogram, mitigates potential loss of revenue and ensures user productivity.SCALIN G C X A N D E XBDO wanted to improve portal functionality to enhance customer acquisition,retention and satisfaction. Because the Alliance Portal’s primary function wasto allow members to efficiently find assets among its 120,000 searchabledata points (including services, documents, webcasts, CPE courses andmore) effective search was imperative.
19SECTION 06LEARNINGSERVICESSCALIN G C X A N D E XOnboarding and professionaldevelopment reimagined
THE PROBLEMTHE SOLUTIONWhen employees have to workremotely, onboarding and employeeengagement initiatives must bereinvented. This is particularly clear inthe area of training and development.Employees today value and seekout professional developmentopportunities, and businesses mustfocus on continuous education bothto meet this employee need andimprove business performance.Scaling these efforts, particularlywhen working with hundreds orthousands of employees, is essentialfor both employee retention andbusiness success.In order to provide effective remoteemployee engagement services,enterprises need a centralized CMSfor storing, managing, disseminatingand updating educational content.Your CMS should have an API-firstinfrastructure to provide front-enddevelopers with greater flexibilityfor rendering content. It also shouldfeature tools that allow teams to worktogether on a single platform withcommon workflows.20SCALIN G C X A N D E X
CASE STUDYCHARLES SCHWAB21When COVID hit, Charles Schwab still had to onboard and equiptheir team to best serve their clients. People trust Schwab with theirinvestments and their future. It was vital for Schwab to retain thattrust. Schwab saw that development time was rising when it cameto their training modules. Modules would take 2-3 months to build,test and deploy. Maintenance of these modules started to tax theinternal design teams.SCALIN G C X A N D E XLike many organizations, Schwab relied on training templates thatwere not accessible on mobile devices – a big problem when yourentire workforce is mobile. These templates were also not flexibleenough to meet Schwab’s new UX standards. By combining theirLMS with Drupal, supported by Acquia, Schwab was able to build amodern enterprise learning system for employees, track critical datapoints and deploy virtual learning experiences that were as effectiveas in-person experiences.
ALWAYS BE SCALINGEven before COVID, we were transitioning toa digital-first world. Commerce and customerexperiences had evolved into a mix of in-personand digital interactions. The pandemic hasaccelerated this trend drastically, to the pointwhere 80% of customer interactions are nowonline. The ability to scale – quickly andsecurely – will determine success in this newbusiness landscape.traffic demands, expanding digital footprints, andemployee onboarding, engagement, training anddevelopment programs.Ensure your enterprise never worries aboutscaling again.LEARN MORESCALIN G C X A N D E XAcquia Drupal Cloud is the best solution on themarket to scale both your customer and employeeexperiences. We are a dedicated partner to helpyou with a variety of use cases, including addingnew capabilities, scaling to meet unforeseen22
23ABOUT ACQUIAAcquia is the open digital experience platform thatenables organizations to build, host, analyze andcommunicate with their customers at scale throughwebsites and digital applications. As the trusted opensource leader, we use adaptive intelligence to producebetter business outcomes for CX leaders.SCALIN G C X A N D E XAC QU IA.C OM
Acquia Digital Experience Platform (DXP) to launch and manage new sites, scale their infrastructure and accommodate the massive influx of traffic to their web properties. Thanks to the use of Acquia Site Factory, the state was able to spin up the coronavirus.health.ny.gov informational site within just three days!
