If you’re eating food on the go in the UK, chances are you’ll have eaten products supplied by Country Choice on more than one occasion. The UK’s leading supplier of in-store bakery and retail food service products needed a new website to replace the existing one in its entirety, involving a whole new front-end, Umbraco CMS and multiple custom-built elements to fulfill its business requirements. Visarc then set out to work:
Skills used
- Design
- Digital Strategy
- Integrations
- Architecture
- PIM Systems
Sector
- B2B
- Food & beverages
Partner doing the case
- Company:Visarc
- Website: https://visarc.uk/
- Type: Gold Partner
Post-launch joys 🎉
About the case
Country Choice’s customer base is vast - they supply everyone from large retailers with a presence across the country to individual small retail outlets.
Our digital solutions all have one business objective in mind, to help Country Choice sell more, whilst our front-end implementations are designed and delivered with customer requirements at the forefront.
As the lead digital agency, we, Visarc, were responsible for the technical consultancy, planning and delivery of enterprise digital solutions for Country Choice. Ranging from their B2B website to a complex data driven PIM Tool (product information management), along with internal staff engagement, our custom solutions enable Country Choice to do better business online.
A new website was required to replace the existing one in its entirety, involving a whole new frontend, Umbraco CMS and multiple custom-built elements to fulfil its business requirements.
Building the brand new website
The new website was developed to take a full advantage of strongly typed model development taking cues from Hybrid Framework, and using plugins from Epiphany: SeoMetadata, DocTypeGridEditor, UrlPicker and uSync to name a few. All this comes together to produce a website that uses multiple levels of caching and compression to deliver a fast and modern web experience. The specific requirements for this case needed to solve the following areas:
🥐 Technical consultancy with custom development and integration of Country Choice’s PIM tool (a product information management tool - branded as eList).
🥐 eList enhanced functionality with a core promotions feature for back-end users to easily select and deploy categorised lists to the customer facing website.
🥐 Creation and development of a suite of B2B engagement tools seamlessly integrated to the website and housed within the ‘Customer Zone’ (member login).
How it all works
Core to the project is the PIM tool known as eList. This is a bespoke integration which takes regular data extracts from a complex SAP implementation and simplifies their product level data.
The Country Choice has high volumes of traffic and is fully integrated with the eList which allows a much simpler implementation of their product catalogue with faster delivery of content.
Promotions is an additional integration within the eList PIM tool, allowing backend users to easily select products, order them into short lists and display them on the website to a schedule managed by the system.
We have also developed a suite of bespoke reusable B2B tools to drive a tailored onboarding and engagement experience for key customers - Customer Zone. It comprises of multiple custom-built solutions include an eLearning portal for the entire network of customers.
In addition to this is a bespoke SEL tool which allows customers to order Shelf Edge Labels for in-store display and has vastly reduced the time required for them to be ordered and produced and has eliminated manual errors.
Custom membership was added to integrate the new website with the existing legacy membership used for the Customer Zone components, this is the first step to fully migrating the nearly 10,000 registered users and sales representatives into the Umbraco CMS and the security benefits of using a modern and secure platform for authentication.
“Umbraco CMS has already been a huge game changer for Country Choice! Working with Visarc, we now have a great custom build with the benefits shining throughout the website.”
Results speak for themselves
The new Country Choice site was launched on May 1st 2018. When comparing data YoY (year on year) from January 2018 (pre-launch) to January 2019 (8 months post launch) we can report the following results:
🥨 11% uplift in session data across all channels
🥨 The number of new users increased by 9.65%
🥨 Avg. Pages per session has increased by 6.72%
🥨 Avg. Session duration has increased by 7.32%
🥨 Avg. Bounce rate has decreased by 19.40%
Client feedback
The new website post-launch numbers may be great, but perhaps the best to reflect on how the new website is doing is our client Country Choice. According to the company’s Digital Marketing Manager Richard Allchin:
“Our bespoke Product Information Management tool has been built directly for our requirements, allowing us to update product information immediately. This is crucial given the speed that ingredients and allergen information change these days!
Another great feature that has been implemented is the promotion tool. We can now simply load in our monthly promotions sheet, this will update multiple areas of the website including a promo feature on the homepage, along with individual product price updates.
My personal favourite is the Customer Zone (Members Login). This is a real key area for us! The customer wall withholds a huge amount of added value documentation, training videos and modules; keeping our customers coming back for more! The system allows our customers to register and immediately log in and get going with the content. Overall this solution has provided us with a great platform and has made management of our new website a whole lot easier and more effective!”
