Virtusa unscrambles tech spaghetti for a leading US publisher

A premier US-based global publisher selected Virtusa as its technology partner to implement the Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) content management system (CMS) to revitalize the overall publisher brand, improve data quality, improve marketing performance, rationalize redundant tools, and offer a seamless and consistent experience to its customers.

The publisher has had a history of diversification, acquisitions, and new brand formations. By 2020, the publisher had expanded to 57 brands and diversified into three new business categories with operations across 24 countries. This expansion came at a price—fragmented data residing across 90+ commercial tools, own brands operating in competing categories, customers’ lack of knowledge about the publisher’s different businesses and brands, inconsistent CX, and a fractured market positioning.

This engagement is an excellent example of understanding why it is vital for enterprises to deliver a consistent and unified user experience.

Years of organic and inorganic growth created a tech spaghetti that led to an inconsistent customer experience, directly affecting our brand image and growth.

– Former Vice President, Digital and Marketing, leading US publisher

Multiple tech and business problems plagued the publisher

The publisher’s various brands were hosted on different content management and data asset management tools. It realized that there was significant variance in customer engagement metrics like page views or time spent per page among its various brands. Moreover, not having a centralized CMS gave rise to three major problems:

• Targeting and personalization became difficult: Having multiple systems in play created data silos, making it impossible for the publisher to gauge customer expectations and tailor its offerings accordingly. It was also challenging to up-sell or cross-sell to customers, as no unified architecture existed.
• Various disconnected brand identities were in play: Each brand’s website had a different look and feel, so there was no way for the end customer to know about the publisher’s other brands and businesses. It was a significant dent in marketing the publisher’s lesser-known brands with low-brand recall.
• There was a significant overload on IT: Multiple CMS releases and version upgrades resulted in complex upgrades and increased maintenance operations for the publisher’s IT team.

The rudimentary authoring and publishing process further exacerbated the problems. A lack of a self-service publishing option meant that marketers had to rely on a cumbersome manual process to publish their content and were utterly dependent on the IT team to publish or make changes.

Implementing Adobe CMS drove a 20% increase in digital sales

In 2021, Virtusa leveraged AEM to build a centralized CMS for consolidating various publisher brands over 12 months. The biggest challenge was the extremely high number of brand sites (57) and their geographic spread across 24 countries. To combat this, The CMS platform was built on foundational multi-site management (MSM) features, enabling multilingual websites to be rolled out across 24 countries where the publisher operates. Building on the concept of a component library, Virtusa created a set of simple and flexible global templates and component libraries for global reuse across publisher brands and sub-brands. The reusable components allowed the various websites to apply similar themes and layouts for consistency and more excellent brand recall. Virtusa topped it up by designing an end-to-end content authoring and approval process to streamline publishing. It also implemented Adobe’s Launch Tag Management Solution to track, collect, process, and report based on user attributes and activities. Virtusa leveraged Adobe Experience Cloud (AEC) to identify and work on various MarTech initiatives.

This comprehensive overhaul of the publisher’s CMS system and move to digital resulted in an enhanced CX that yielded multiple tangible results, such as a 20% increase in digital sales, a decrease of 6% in the website’s bounce rate, and an increase of 13% in page views. An increase in the NPS score indicated enhanced brand recognition, reduced software licensing and maintenance cost, and a 27% increase in the delivery of content as authors were not dependent on IT for publishing their work.

Virtusa’s decades of industry experience helped them execute the engagement effectively

Virtusa is a platinum Adobe partner with a 15-year-old partnership, during which it has delivered over 100 Adobe projects for 40 clients. Virtusa’s Adobe COE has more than 1,500 Adobe resources, 58% of which have Adobe certifications. Virtusa’s knowledge of various Adobe solutions in content management, analytics, personalization, marketing automation, and customer data platforms helped bring in the right capability during the engagement. To expedite the entire implementation process, a couple of accelerators were leveraged. For example, LaunchPad2.0 is a set of pre-built components and templates built on Adobe Experience Cloud to reduce time to market by 30%–40%. Virtusa also has co-developed accredited partner solutions with Adobe called AEP Customer 360 that help businesses deliver real-time experiences increasing conversions by 2%.

Virtusa demonstrated expertise in solving complex content-related challenges, retaining talent, and introducing different Adobe products at critical junctures of the project lifecycle. This core capability was well complemented by fair and competitive pricing

– Vice President, Digital and Marketing, leading US publisher

Another essential aspect Virtusa took care of was assigning quality resources to the project and making sure they stayed around. The publisher told HFS that around a team of 60–70 resources are deployed to the project. The attrition rate has been less than 10% in the past two years, and all key resources have stayed. Although the team is scattered across parts of the US and two cities in India—Bangalore and Hyderabad—the communication has been seamless.

The Bottom Line: Enterprises looking to rationalize their tech spaghetti and upgrade from legacy systems should prioritize a consistent user experience while selecting a service provider.

The publisher’s move to a single CMS system across all its brands and geographies ensured the end user gets the same experience while interacting with its 57 brands. Additionally, the consistent branding and similar experience (layout, themes) across all the publisher’s websites representing different brands led to a higher NPS score and brand recall.