Winner, 2019 Acquia Engage Award, Excellence in Digital Marketing.
Wolf Steel Ltd. is North America’s largest privately owned manufacturer of wood and gas fireplaces, gas and charcoal grills, outdoor living products, and heating and cooling products. ISO9001 – 2008 registered, Wolf Steel Ltd. operates 1,200,000 square feet of manufacturing space, employs over 1200 people, and is the parent company of several consumer brands including the well-known luxury Napoleon® line.
Product distribution covers all of North America, Europe, the Middle East and reaching into the Far East, Australia, and New Zealand.
Challenge
As the Napoleon brand accelerates worldwide and into new markets, its parent company recognized a need for an efficient and scalable approach that would not only reconcile existing issues but elevate its online presence and the sales and customer service experience.
As it were, the Napoleon technical care team of Wolf Steel Ltd. is responsible for the support and maintenance of 40+ web properties relating to Napoleon product lines marketed in different countries and in several languages. The web properties were built on a range of technologies - from WordPress to DNN - and each had different levels of functionality and age.
Above: Some of the legacy websites the client technical care team managed.
Pain Points:
- Fragmented product information
- Too many websites
- Internal resources (technical care team) are being used inefficiently
- Consistency across websites is a manual task and prone to human error
- The customer order management process is very manual and prone to human error
- The dated websites/technologies are harder to maintain
It was time for change.
About the project
Client Goals
Internal:
- To create standardizations, processes, one common technology across all websites
- To reduce the overall cost to support and maintain websites
- Provide increased stability and performance that will improve the productivity of all internal users
External:
- Personalize the web experience based on user segmentation and use persona scoring to support interactions such as page visits, form submissions, video plays, document downloads, visits of personalized pages and CRM data
- To provide tools, resources, and a roadmap that will support the client corporation worldwide in its goal to deliver a world-class customer experience
Requirements
- Establish the structure for a single domain to house all Napoleon products (divisions such as grills, HVACS, fireplaces).
- Build out the website starting with the Grills product line, in several languages and with the following location-specific language content:
- US-English (en-US)
- US-Spanish (es-US)
- Canada-English (en-CA)
- Canada-French (fr-CA)
- Prepare other languages for site-specific regions (using Lingotek integration)
- Configure a new search appliance (Apache Solr)
- Install and set up Acquia Lift
- Collaborate with Napoleon technical care team and provide ongoing technical support
- Provide a Drupal content management system roadmap on how and why the proposed system will stay current
Outcome
Launched after eight months in development the resulting website is a fully responsive, WCAG 2.0 Level AA compliant solution that centralizes the management of all former Napoleon sites and marketing campaigns across several regions and languages, providing an extensible and flexible framework to grow over time as needs evolve. It also enriches the sales and customer service journey by providing several new features supported by site personalization, readying the business for growth in both existing and new target markets.
One global landing page - napoleongrills.com - serves as the ‘hub’, if you will, and allows for users to choose from a menu of regions and languages. It will auto locate to the country the visitor is searching from. The landing page does not remember a selection due to cookie policies in Europe, US and Canada, however, the visitor may bookmark the regional page in the preferred language, in order to avoid selecting regions on the global page.
Thanks to Acquia Lift, content managers can track visitor behaviour throughout the site and deliver in-context, personalized experiences across nine different languages and 10 different regions.
The site has subsites per division/product, and per region. The site administrator manages the parent/child relationships to regions and languages. Translation services are provided with Lingotek allowing for an unlimited amount of languages and include manual translated content.
The site is fully responsive for mobile and AODA compliant meeting WCAG 2.0 Level AA standards.
The site has flexible layouts built with Bricks. There are several other advantages for site administrator and for visitor alike, including:
- Integration with Salesforce automates several processes for the sales team.
- Integration with Salsify, the client Product Information Management system. Pulls product data automatically into the Drupal CMS, reducing the technical care team workload significantly.
- Integration with Bazaarvoice pulls in reviews and ratings for Napoleon products, and on the recipe/lifestyle blog portion of the site.
- Complicated search functionality with Apache SOLR provides subsite-specific search, department-specific search, advanced facets and custom facets including AJAX slider facets, and a total of 6 search views.
- Megamenu combo with a responsive menu (different menu per region and department, IP geolocation and redirect based on IP).
- Acquia Lift personalization gives content managers the ability to track visitor behaviour throughout the site, and deliver in-context, personalized experiences across nine different languages and 10 different regions.
- Dealer locator feature: Custom Google Maps integration with spidering, geolocation by IP.
- Dealer locator per product: Integrates with a mapping platform to create a dealer locator that allows users to find Napoleon brand retailers close to them and include relevant details about those retailers.
- Wish List functionality, with suggested dealers.
- Chatbot feature.
Summary
With Drupal as the one common technology across the board, standardizations and processes are firmly in place.
With Acquia Lift this corporation is ready to deliver world-class customer service and can scale for the next part of its strategic plan.
The initial cost of investment is offset by the significant savings in overall digital spend, reduced human errors, and reduction of duplicated work.
Why Drupal was chosen
Napoleon parent company Wolf Steel Ltd. published an RFP and evaluated several different enterprise CMS platforms.
The client had a detailed requirements list included in its RFP, several pages long.
The Drupal content management system was selected after Drupal development firm Northern provided information proving this open-source technology met or exceeded client requirements specific to SEO, workflow and authoring, digital asset management, form management, language support, and personalization -- and that Drupal met or exceeded the client selection criteria across price, technology and support, time to market delivery, and a product roadmap/development planning.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Bricks
Bricks provides this site with flexible layouts. Bricks is the new Paragraphs, an alternative to Panelizer and a good friend to ECK, Inline Entity Form and your favourite WYSIWYG. In summary, it allows to nest Entity Reference field items using Drupal drag & drop UI (exactly like for menu or taxonomy items).
Geolocation Field
This module adds geofield to any entity. We used this so now a user can link back to the products and link products back to their dealers on the map. This will add proximity filter to views so we will be able to search by zip or postal code and some additional Google map customizations.
Lingotek
This module supports the translation of any content and configuration. Paid users of Lingotek's cloud-based translation management system (TMS) can leverage customizable workflows based on content type or language as well as leverage linguistic assets such as glossaries, style guides and translation memory. Lingotek integration helped this site get up and running with nine languages, as quickly as it did.
Bazaarvoice
The Bazaarvoice module is a suite of modules that provide a wide range of integrations with the Bazaarvoice ratings and reviews service. Reviews are not stored in Drupal but pulled from Bazaarvoice using the Conversations API. We used this to allow for products to have ratings, reviews, embedded in each view.
