Rebecca Gibson |
This article first appeared in the Spring 2017 issue of The Record.
Founded in China in 1992, Nippon Paint China has become one of the country’s major domestic coatings provider and one of the world’s top paint manufacturers. Like other companies around the world, Nippon Paint knew that to continue improving customer experience and driving brand loyalty and increased revenue, it had to find a way to gain better insights into customers’ wants and needs.
However, the company was restricted by its 18 websites and 15 WeChat accounts, which had been developed and maintained by several different vendors. This made it difficult for the company to gain valuable and actionable insights into its customers, limiting its ability to provide the personalised experiences that build client loyalty.
Nippon Paint opted to work with Avanade, a provider of digital and cloud services, business solutions and design-led experiences built on products in the Microsoft technology stack.
Following a thorough investigation into Nippon Paint’s business situation to identify its operational issues, Avanade developed a website transformation strategy. First, it migrated two Nippon Paint websites to the Sitecore Experience Platform 8.1, which is built around Microsoft Azure cloud services. Based on the success of this pilot, Avanade will help the paint manufacturer to consolidate all 18 websites, and integrate all customer data and social media content with the Sitecore platform.
By migrating multiple websites onto one platform, Nippon Paint hopes to deliver improved functionality to its employees so they can gain a unified view of customer behaviour and understand what they want and need. This will enable the company to interact more frequently and naturally with customers, offering them data-rich and personalised online experiences and offerings.
The new website infrastructure is more scalable and can support more daily traffic. It also gives Nippon Paint the flexibility to develop more sophisticated marketing strategies to more engaging marketing campaigns that are tailored to the preferences of its customers. In addition, the leadership team can gain a real-time overview of the website’s status.