Redesigning User Experience to Reach More Customers
Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic forced businesses to adapt to a new reality of remote work. Building on the success of a previous partnership with Prime 8, a global technology company wanted to expand its virtual training offerings to include more advanced courses and certifications. The company also needed to find ways to reach more customers.
The Prime 8 Consulting team collaborated closely with the client to revamp the client’s website, update product positioning, curate existing training materials and develop new ones, and train field associates on a new intake procedure.
The Challenge
Prime 8’s client was struggling to provide advanced courses and certifications for its products and services through virtual training. Having already converted all of its in-person training content to a virtual model, it still needed a way to reach customers online who once came into retail stores. The company was also in a transition period, working to identify its ideal target audiences.
The Prime 8 team was tasked with curating existing training content as well as developing new content that supported each of two groups: internal employees and commercial audiences. Because of the scope of work, the team needed to find a way to streamline the process.
What’s more, the existing website allowed training associates from hubs across the U.S. (as well as locations in Sydney and London) to publish sessions. Despite standardizing templates for the training teams to leverage and communicating those to the distributed field teams, field associates were publishing content that didn’t conform to the client’s brand standards. This practice resulted in a large body of outlier content that was not optimized for broader audience engagement, contributing to low engagement and traffic.
The Solution
Prime 8 proposed that instead of providing training and instructional design (ID) services as they had done in the previous phase of the project, the consulting team would move to a more strategic role.
The team began by analyzing industry and marketing trends and understanding the training and delivery needs of both customers and employees of the client. They refocused product positioning on a target audience that aligned more closely with the company’s current marketing strategy and implemented a marketing push with partners in the client’s extensive ecosystem.
The team then strategically revamped the training website with a focus on file reorganization and ease of use. They trimmed down the number of topics that appeared on the front end and grouped them by primary topic. The team grouped trainings so users could see a single topic name and click into the product page for the course description and details. They then created subtopic categories to capture specific needs and fine-tune targeting.
To solve the challenge of field trainers publishing inconsistent content on the site, the team standardized a formula and trained the field to follow the new streamlined intake processes when publishing content.
The consulting team also focused on enhancing the site's merchandising opportunities, implementing SEO best practices and cultivating traffic opportunities. They optimized all content used on the site for SEO, resulting in organic traffic growth to attract new online audiences.
Throughout the project, Prime 8 collaborated with the client’s web development and back-end teams to understand both trainer and customer needs. They optimized new content for both groups and created a roadmap for several site enhancements that improved the user experience for both audiences.
The Results
Prime 8's consulting services for this global technology company helped the client to achieve its goal of reaching more customers with a new virtual business model. The site’s organic search traffic as a percentage of unique visits increased by 36%.
Following the optimization project, the client reported increased traffic and conversion rates, with total traffic up by 18% and conversions up by 33% Q/Q.
The Prime 8 consultant team also received instant kudos from the field after the website updates:
“Not sure who to give kudos to, but if you haven’t visited the public training site, they have updated it to put the trainings into categories. And on a call with a customer, it was a home run! Someone help me find who needs to be celebrated. 🙂”
What’s more, the client now has a streamlined content library and consistency through both internal and public-facing trainings. The Prime 8 team also left the client with a body of valuable thought leadership around customer and stakeholder needs to use in future marketing strategies.
The Prime 8 consultants focused on learner outcomes, monitoring the success of the new courses and making adjustments as needed. The outcome was a suite of advanced courses and certifications that enabled the client to meet new business demands and differentiate itself in the market as an industry leader in training and certification.