Customer Solution Case Study
/ Dell Financial Services Improves User Experience with Web Content Management Solution
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Financial services
Customer Profile
Based in Austin, Texas, Dell Financial Services (DFS) provides financing options for customers who purchase technology and services from Dell.
Business Situation
DFS needed to provide better integration between its Web site and Dell.com. It also needed to enable business users to update site content more easily, without help from IT.
Solution
Dell Financial Services used Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as the foundation for its Web site. Now, users can update site content with minimal IT involvement and optimal customer results.
Benefits
· Provides better customer experience
· Reduces update time from weeks to hours
· Offers familiar, scalable environment
· Fosters business growth / “Office SharePoint Server 2007 helps us ensure that we are presenting the best image possible.”
Ruben Cavazos, Development Lead, Dell Financial Services
Dell Financial Services (DFS) is the financing arm of Dell, one of the world’s leading technology and services providers. To maximize customer financing opportunities, the company needed to create a more seamless transition between Dell.com and the DFS Web site. It also needed to update its underlying Web site technology to enable business users to easily manage site content. DFS implemented a Web content management solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The new environment provides built-in workflow and tools that promote a standardized look and feel based on Dell.com. Now, the company can keep site content fresh and relevant, without IT intervention. And content updates that once required weeks of significant development effort are now completed by business users in just a few hours.
Situation
Dell Financial Services (DFS) provides financing solutions for customers who purchase Dell products and services. Dell is a leading provider of technology products and services worldwide.
DFS strives to deliver a superior customer experience, and thereby enhance customer retention, by streamlining the financing process so that customers can acquire products with ease.
To provide an integrated experience, DFS must provide customers with a smooth transition from Dell.com to its own online financing services. “Over time, the relationship between the DFS site and Dell.com became somewhat fragmented,” explains Ruben Cavazos, Development Lead at Dell Financial Services. “The sites are two separate entities, with very different missions, and were based on different technologies.”
The DFS site offers information about financing options, provides links to the application process for financing, and provides a range of self-service options for financing customers, such as online account management, support, and payment options. The site was built using Active Server Pages (ASP) and the Microsoft Visual Basic development system. “The site was a series of static ASP pages with no dynamic content. And because we lacked a Web content management system, there was no way that business users could update content without going through IT,” says Cavazos. To implement even the smallest change to the site required a developer’s attention. And because the site lacked a formalized workflow process and tools and templates for creating pages with a standardized look and feel, it was difficult for DFS to ensure compliance with corporate guidelines. “To bring DFS up to speed as a viable Web self-service offering for our customers, we needed to move the site to a new platform—to redesign the architecture.”
DFS wanted to achieve the highest return on investment in its Web site solution. “To launch a new content management system, we needed to adopt an accepted, familiar technology for which there were already internal resources available.”
Solution
In 2006, DFS began to evaluate Web content management systems from different vendors. “We found many of these systems to be very costly, and to adopt them would have also required us to form new business relationships,” says Cavazos. In addition, DFS does not control the IT infrastructure behind its Web services. “We rely on IT services—such as networking and database technology—which are shared by business groups across the company,” explains Cavazos. “To launch a new Web content management solution would require lots of collaboration with IT and other business units.”
DFS then considered using a solution it already used for document management and internal collaboration among business units and project teams, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. “When we understood the full capabilities of Office SharePoint Server 2007 as a Web content management system, we knew we had found a solution to our problem,” says Cavazos. “The product was already in our environment and we knew how to support it. It was a no-brainer. We have a lot of in-house development expertise with the Microsoft .NET Framework, and people who know SharePoint Server 2007 backwards and forwards. SharePoint Server 2007 enabled us to take advantage of our existing investment in Microsoft products and technologies.”
In 2007, DFS deployed its new Web site on Office SharePoint Server 2007. The company uses out-of-the-box SharePoint workflows to implement Web site changes. To add new pages or make modifications to existing content, users initiate changes using a rich, Web-based SharePoint editor that supports tables and tools for checking spelling. The workflows and editing capabilities help DFS conduct timely publishing and updated content to its audience.
Other changes, such as modifying rotating marketing banner ads, are initiated from a SharePoint list. This kicks off the workflow process, which ensures that the changes are reviewed by the appropriate individuals. For instance, if DFS offers a promotional deal that requires lowering a published financing rate, the new copy is verified by product segment owners, marketing staff, and compliance officers, as well as by copy editors and legal reviewers. The workflow automatically triggers e-mail messages to those involved in the review, notifying them that their attention is required. Once all approvals are complete, the new content is extracted from the SharePoint list and converted into Web content so that the author can see what the changes will look like on an actual Web page. Finally, using the built-in content deployment functionality in Office SharePoint Server 2007, the changes are sent to a staging server for final review, and then to production servers for final publication.
“The publishing workflow is very important, not just for ease of content management, but for the controls it enforces on the change process,” says Cavazos. As a finance company, DFS is very careful about the information it publishes, and this care extends to the content it displays on the Web. “By segregating user roles, maintaining a change history, and providing flexible exception processes, Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides the change management process we need to meet our legal and compliance departments’ standards,” Cavazos adds.
DFS uses Master Pages and Page Layouts, which are provided in Office SharePoint Server 2007. Because the DFS site design and style guidelines are built into these templates, the company can easily maintain a consistent look and branding across the site and easily respond to changing business requirements because the templates simplify the publishing process.
Benefits
Using Office SharePoint Server 2007 as the foundation for its Web site, Dell Financial Services provides a better, more consistent experience for customers as they transition from the shopping experience on Dell.com to the financing experience with DFS. The company is able to rapidly deliver updated content to users with minimal help from IT. The new authoring environment was readily accepted by business users because of their existing familiarity with Office SharePoint Server 2007. The new site is also highly reliable and capable of supporting the future growth of DFS.
Provides Better Customer Experience
“We were looking for a solution that would enable us to provide a common look and feel, as well as a common user experience. With Office SharePoint Server 2007, we’ve been able to replicate the look and feel of Dell.com with almost no constraints,” says Cavazos. Now, DFS content authors can update content without assistance from IT. And changes to standard site elements, such as navigation and banner ads, are propagated automatically. For users who navigate between Dell.com and the DFS site, these capabilities will provide a much cleaner, more unified experience. “Our business users have done hundreds of updates on their own,” says Cavazos. “The site has gone from stale to dynamic with Office SharePoint Server 2007.”
The stability and reliability of the site is also key for DFS. “The site has been up for one and a half years,” says Cavazos. “In that time, we've had zero availability issues. It uses standard Microsoft technologies, with the front end being very similar to a standard ASP.NET Web site, and because these underlying technologies are solid and known, our uptime is good. Office SharePoint Server 2007 helps us ensure that we are presenting the best image possible.”
Reduces Update Time from Weeks to Hours
The new site also enables DFS to be more responsive to customers through enhanced customer support, than it could with its previous site. And, it can do this with less reliance on the IT department. For instance, as part of an upgrade to an area of its Web site, DFS introduced a new self-service, online, form-based application, and, as part of this upgrade, had to revise the account login process for customers. DFS easily published help content to guide customers through the new process. “Our business users were able to create several help pages and an FAQ page, which function as a miniwizard both for new customers coming from Dell.com and for current DFS customers. The pages address any problems a customer might encounter with the login process. With Office SharePoint Server 2007, it only took hours to publish the help pages. With our old system, it would have taken weeks, and it would have required help from IT,” says Cavazos.
Cavazos also says that because DFS was able to publish the new help content so quickly, it vastly reduced what would have been an overwhelming number of calls from confused customers. “On the first day that this new functionality was live, we received customer feedback on which aspects of the help content was or was not helpful, and with Office SharePoint Server 2007, we could modify the pages in real-time, to make the content even more intuitive and helpful,” he says. “Office SharePoint Server 2007 helped us simplify the process for customers so that now they can do it 100 percent on their own, without calling for support.”
In the long run, DFS expects that the ability to quickly provide customers with effective and comprehensive self-service options, such as updated FAQ pages, will help to lower call center costs and also improve customer retention.
Offers Familiar, Scalable Environment
It was easy for DFS to adopt Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Web content management because business users were already familiar with the environment from their experience using the system for internal document management and collaboration. “Office SharePoint Server 2007 already existed in the Dell infrastructure, and within the collective knowledge of the enterprise. This was key to getting the solution in the door and providing a capability that was long overdue.”
DFS is highly confident that the system will scale to accommodate future growth. “We know that for the DFS site, Office SharePoint Server 2007 will scale in a fashion similar to what we’ve seen it do in the rest of our environment,” says Cavazos.
Fosters Business Growth
The Web services delivered through the DFS site is the mechanism through which the company’s business transactions occur. “Office SharePoint Server, as the infrastructure for our self-service Web site, facilitates the business of DFS,” says Cavazos. Since deploying its Web site on Office SharePoint Server 2007, the portion of active DFS account holders who use the Web site has increased more than 50 percent.
The DFS home page sees approximately 50,000 unique visits a day. “We’ve seen a consistent uptick in the self-service area of our site since launching Office SharePoint Server 2007. I attribute this largely to the fact that we are now able to keep the site fresh, functional, easier to use, and familiar to users as they transition from Dell.com.”
Microsoft Office System
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