Customer Success Story

BEHIND-THE-SCENES STRUCTURE IMPROVES CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

The task of reorganizing  Agilent’s large catalog of scientific instruments, expanding the detail and depth of product content, and cross-linking instruments to Agilent supplies and services required an overhaul of Agilent’s information architecture.

“A central challenge Agilent had was generating customer experiences that required consumable products and instrument products to be related to each other in a compelling way,” explained Ryan Loechl, a senior consultant for Dakota Systems. “Agilent wanted to support experiences like cross-selling and up-selling, and otherwise run the gamut of product recommendations. They wanted to support alternative ways to navigate to products through secondary hierarchies in PIM. They wanted to enable search to function more optimally.”

To meet these goals, Dakota developed a new logical data model for PIM that could support Agilent’s diverse product portfolio, relate products to each other in new ways, and relate products to applications and solutions. Next, Dakota defined detailed technical attributes for over 500 product categories to support search, filtering, and comparisons on product pages. But most importantly, Dakota had to cultivate buy-in across different levels of the company, to get them fully engaged in doing the new and different work required by the new digital strategy.

As product teams move through the program with Dakota, Agilent has been progressively replacing their legacy manually crafted marketing web pages with content-rich, PIM-driven product detail pages. The resulting product pages meet consumer demands for deep product information and links between products, supplies, and services. The PIM team also has an information architecture that is easier to manage and better able to incorporate new products, services, and acquisitions. As they enter the eighteenth month of their partnership, Dakota is completing work on the final sections of the Agilent product portfolio and integrating products from companies that Agilent has acquired. Dakota plans to help Agilent with other content strategy needs, including knowledge management for supporting sales and service. 

 As a result of the PIM Acceleration Program, Agilent Technologies has consistent and effective product information for all channels. The results are better teamwork between product managers and the digital teams; the more efficient launch of products into all channels; more cross-selling of supplies, services, and spare parts; improved website navigation; improved SEO; and improved site search. All of these benefits add up to create a dramatically better customer experience, which drives loyalty and revenue.

USING ANALYTICS TO GET BUY-IN ON DIGITAL CHANGE

How does Dakota Systems get a company to understand the value of better digital content? By showing them the numbers.

Agilent manufacturers high-end instruments that life scientists around the world use to conduct cutting-edge research. When Agilent revamped their content strategy, they knew that they needed better links between content about their instruments and the supplies and services needed to solve customer problems. But the road from identifying a problem to getting buy-in on a solution across the company can be long.

“Where the Dakota team really helped was bridging the gap between where Agilent was today and where we wanted to be,” said Michael Conant, Director of Digital Strategy, Planning, and Architecture at Agilent Technologies. “Dakota showed us maturity models of how the kind of information architecture solutions they were putting forward had impacted our competitors, and they framed the problem in terms of what our customers were trying to do on our platforms.”

As digital content becomes ever more critical to B2B buyers’ purchase decisions, it is crucial for businesses to evolve their digital content strategies, rooted in an understanding of what customers need and how they can reach them.

“Dakota provided metric-oriented tie-ins that helped the people at Agilent get why this was important,” Conant explained. “They did a deep dive analysis of our website, looking at data around time-on page and trying to tie that back to what a good page should look like, and communicating some of the behind-the-scenes elements that make for a strong online platform.”

Dakota’s ability to demonstrate an understanding of not only the nuts-and-bolts of information architecture, but how it supported a large corporation’s digital business strategy, is what got buy-in from Agilent.

“We have a complex business at Agilent,” Conant said, “with brilliant people who are extremely knowledgeable in their field of expertise. It is exceedingly difficult to sell ‘change’ to an audience of very bright people, and it is difficult to sell change to a company as diverse as Agilent. But Dakota was able to crack the code. They had the ability to articulate not just an understanding of how Product Information Management (PIM) works, but an integrated view of why this is a key element for tying together the rest of the content strategies we had in mind.”