Optimized experiences

For many companies today, a website is essential to business. Corporate websites share not only information about products and services, they also give customers a glimpse into the people and values that make up a business. The biggest question for companies becomes what information to share on their websites and how to convey the information to engage customers.

This is the question that inspired Manulife to refocus its website experience around the customer. Manulife is a leading financial services group that operates in Canada and Asia, and in the United States under the John Hancock brand. The company provides financial advice, insurance, and wealth and asset management solutions for individuals, groups, and institutions.

Manulife originally designed its manulife.ca website based on its own corporate structure. The company realized that it needed to change perspectives and focus on the information that the customer wanted to see.

“We wanted to make a better experience for our customers online, but first we needed to understand what customers need, and what they wanted to hear from us,” says Sophie Bellemare, AVP Strategic Digital Initiatives at Manulife. “Then we needed a consistent way to apply those insights across multiple pages and websites to improve experiences, engagement, and conversions.”

Meeting tight deadlines

With business goals in place, Manulife realized that its existing IT solution wasn’t up to the challenge. After evaluating multiple vendors, Manulife selected Adobe Experience Manager to form the foundation of its new digital platform. Adobe Experience Manager, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud, provides the agility and consistency that Manulife needs in a scalable content management system.

The results of the three-month proof of concept with Adobe were extremely positive, and the company wanted to deliver on the project quickly. It enlisted the help of Adobe Customer Solutions to meet its deadline requirements. Adobe team members worked with Manulife to design 11 templates and 38 components that could be reused to quickly build new site content. Adobe also handled changes to help the website comply with the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA).

By hosting the Adobe solutions in the cloud through Adobe Experience Manager Managed Services, Manulife also eliminated the need to divert internal resources to purchasing, setting up, and managing the infrastructure. Manulife plans to expand its online customer services to include a private portal that will display all of a customer’s accounts and data in one location. Managed Services allows Manulife to scale quickly, dramatically reducing the time to market for new services.

“We had a hard and fast deadline to get our new system in place before our peak season,” says Bellemare. “Working with Adobe, we met our go-live date and started providing better digital experiences for our customers right away.”

Simplifying the website experience

The legacy website was unfocused and difficult for customers to navigate because it was so large. Each division had its own digital team that created content about its services for the website. Hundreds of content authors contributed to create 1,200 pages. Since there was no central organization, similar content could get posted multiple times from different divisions.

“Looking at our website from a customer-first perspective, we realized that we needed to simplify the experience and provide a single source for the information that they needed,” says Bellemare. “We centralized all content production with a central team using Adobe Experience Manager and consolidated our website to 250 pages. According to our publishing team, the difference between our previous solution and Adobe Experience Manager is night and day. It’s much more efficient and intuitive.”

Adobe Experience Manager Sites leverages reusable templates and components to make web page creation fast and easy. By arranging the reusable templates and components in different combinations, the publishing team has the flexibility to make pages for any type of content while still maintaining branding and consistency across pages. The templates even support responsive design for optimized display across all platforms, from desktops to mobile devices.

Working with a central team reduces duplication of resources and assets, and it encourages more frequent, coordinated updates to the website. Today, it’s much easier for customers to find the information that they need.

Optimizing services through customer insight

With Adobe Analytics, part of Adobe Analytics Cloud, Manulife measures web traffic, engagement rates, and conversion rates to understand who its audiences are and what information they’re looking for on the site. Insights from this data help Manulife determine how to optimize and even personalize experiences.

“Through analytics, we realized that visitors were having trouble finding the information that they were looking for on the previous website,” says Bellemare. “That inspired us to simplify the website and provide a customer-first experience. Adobe Analytics helps us understand how our changes improve the digital experience for our customers.”

Since deploying Adobe Experience Manager, Bellemare has seen the number of quotes issued to prospective customers rising. Adding a call-to-action to product pages, such as encouraging visitors to contact an advisor, also seems to be having a positive effect on conversion. Even small changes, such as reordering a drop-down list, improve experiences by helping customers get to the information that they need faster and with less confusion.

Manulife plans to use data from Adobe Analytics to drive personalization to websites for even greater engagement. For example, there are dozens of possible telephone numbers, forms, and claims processes, and policy holders were often frustrated because they couldn’t figure out who to contact or what to download to file a claim. Using browsing patterns, Manulife can predict what type of claim customers are trying to file and guide them towards the correct information, reducing frustration and improving experiences dramatically.

“I know we made the right decision to work with Adobe,” says Bellemare. “With Adobe Experience Cloud, we have the technology that will help us grow our business.”

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