Client Success Brightstarr ROI realized with SharePoint transformation: How BrightStarr used Webtrends Analytics to rapidly improve the adoption of a global SharePoint intranet The client BrightStarr is a leader in the SharePoint consulting space, blending a digital agency user experience-focused approach and technology expertise to build cutting-edge solutions for its clients. BrightStarr s innovative group of SharePoint experts have found tremendous success building award winning intranets, extranets, and public facing websites. Maintaining Gold level competencies as a Microsoft Partner, BrightStarr has leveraged their continuing success to service a myriad of industries from the retail sector to highly regulated areas such as healthcare and energy. BrightStarr is an experienced and certified multi-year Webtrends Agency and SharePoint Partner. The challenge The internal IT team of a 25,000-employee industry leader and provider of medical solutions had come to realize that although SharePoint has huge potential as a platform, careful planning and a user-centered design is required to ensure intranet effectiveness and adoption. The primary request from business users across the organization was for a more personalized system that was designed to cater to their specific industrial, organizational, and departmental needs in an international setting. Based on the poor user experience and difficulty in finding needed information, the intranet, and SharePoint by association, had a poor reputation. The project required that the intranet design and functionality be updated to better meet user needs while ensuring it complied with all legal, privacy, security, and compliance regulations of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and other global regulatory agencies. BrightStarr s goal was to help the client get the most out of their intranet by creating a new culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing within the organization. The problem was that the client did not know what specific issues they should address first to get the greatest return on their investment. This case study highlights how BrightStarr successfully met the client s needs through a combination of our proven project methodology and Webtrends Analytics for SharePoint product, which enabled BrightStarr and the client to make intelligent decisions about what changes to make to the intranet, guiding the project to successful adoption and continuous evolution. 1
Once deployed, the Webtrends solution provided data that was key to the direction and progress of the overall project. BrightStarr coupled the findings with its unique project delivery model, called Kinetica, to help the client formulate its intranet strategy and focus on user experience deployment and rollout by identifying areas of low use, analyzing search patterns, and monitoring data for trends. Once these improvement areas were identified, BrightStarr worked with the client to define success metrics through improved measurements for specific data points. After deployment, BrightStarr was also able to identify areas that required greater end user adoption, detailing areas where users required more focused training, visual adoption tools such a launch video, and intranet messaging. The client stakeholders quickly learned to trust and depend on the Webtrends analytics solution and collaborated with BrightStarr to transform the data into actionable changes that resulted in a significant return on investment. The solution BrightStarr s Approach: Methodology and Key Highlights BrightStarr began the project by exploring the client s various intranet personas and their needs, along with the corporate policies and procedures with which the organization needed to comply. BrightStarr recommended using Webtrends Analytics for SharePoint product to analyze the current corporate intranet for site usage and behavioral patterns and to quickly identify the pain points and success criteria for the global audience. Initially the client was hesitant about using a data-gathering product such as Webtrends due to its compliance constraints and privacy regulations. However, the Webtrends product team helped the client feel comfortable with its use by showing how easy it is to adapt and control the information gathered to ensure employee privacy. Understanding International Use The objective in using Webtrends Analytics for SharePoint was to analyze how users were using existing features and determine what additional features or changes could be made to enhance the user s intranet experience. The fact that users were spread across different countries and cities made it difficult to understand everyone s unique problems. Figure 1 depicts how the site visitors were spread across eight different countries. However, the site distribution use was not representative of the actual employee distribution, indicating that international employees were not visiting the corporate intranet as frequently as U.S.-based employees. BrightStarr needed to determine the cause. FIGURE 1 Global Intranet Site Use Distribution 2
Further analysis revealed that the majority of international users felt that the information presented on the corporate site was not relevant to their locale. For example, they felt that corporate and industry news and events were more targeted towards U.S. employees than local offices. Additionally, many users preferred content to be translated into their native language, even if it was about corporate events. These insights were instrumental in the decision to create country-specific sites where relevant local content would have prominence. Keeping the corporate brand and information consistent was essential, so it was decided to provide users functionality to easily translate content into six different languages such as Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and French. These changes led to a 35 percent increase in site usage for these different international locations. Several country, office, and business-unit specific subsites were also added to provide the most relevant and targeted information to the end user. Search and Findability Webtrends reports that were focused on search and the end user s ability to find what they need revealed that the intranet needed a more robust and intuitive search experience. There was a need to make finding frequently searched items easy, especially for line-of-business applications and facility-specific information for new employees. Using the information gathered from the most frequent search patterns, BrightStarr recommended adding some new features to improve the user experience. A feature was added to provide each employee with a list of easily accessible and personalized quick links to store frequently used resources. Another was a search-term tag cloud populated with frequently searched items to allow users to click and search without typing in the search box. Adapting to the users needs based on their site usage helped them easily navigate to the information they seek on the intranet, hence making their overall site experience comfortable and repeatable. FIGURE 2 Search-Term Tag Cloud Some of the most frequent types of documents searched for by employees included policy documents and forms. Based on this data, BrightStarr proposed the creation of a dedicated section on the site where users could find and favorite (bookmark) frequently accessed items. Today the Form & Policy Central site enables users to quickly locate what they need faster than ever before. 3
Site Navigation Data provided by Webtrends also influenced the redesign of the intranet site navigation. Data on where user s clicked around the site resulted in the design of new header and footer navigation. To allow for greater individual preferences with organization, BrightStarr created a feature where users could personalize their own favorite links on the site. This feature was a great success and had an adoption rate of approximately 40 percent by the global site users within the first week of its implementation. Custom Reporting and Multi-Media Analytics Based on the early success achieved with insights highlighted by the Webtrends product, the client requested BrightStarr to expand the standard reporting capabilities by designing custom reports for specific internal campaigns and special features on their intranet. One such feature was an Adobe Flash-based multimedia carousel that displayed latest news and popular articles recently published by employees from across the globe. The results from only a week s analytics around this feature led to several discoveries that ultimately resulted in its complete redesign. One of the most significant discoveries was that 12 percent of the site users either did not have the Adobe Flash browser plug-in installed or had it disabled on their devices. As a result, the carousel was redesigned using HTML5 and CSS3 to support a wider range of modern browsers and mobile devices. The client s multimedia carousel also contained targeted video campaigns created by the internal communications department. The custom analytics reporting from Webtrends captured analytics indicating how many times and how long video content was played. Upon analyzing the data and through additional user interviews, BrightStarr determined that most users found that the videos were too small and ineffective for use. As a result, the original design (Figure 3) was modified to allow for a larger area for video and image content (Figure 4). Further, the news article content was moved from the media carousel into a separate web part and placed into a tabbed section where the user could easily toggle between the highest rated and most recently published articles. The new design resulted in a 75 percent increase in the number of video views. FIGURE 3 Video Wireframe Before Redesign Depicting Small Video Frame 4
FIGURE 4 Redesigned Video Wireframe Depicting Large Video Frame Another significant statistic around video content was that approximately 30 percent of intranet users stopped watching videos before they were finished. Analytics showed that the average user would either pause the video or exit the page within two minutes of starting to any given video. Originally the average video duration was approximately four minutes, but when the video duration was reduced to two minutes the number of viewers who watched the complete video went up by 60 percent. This was a simple change that resulted in a significant increase in use rates. Adoption Strategy Webtrends not only helped in planning new innovative features based on user behavior metrics, it helped develop an adoption strategy once features were released. Training formed a significant part of the success story of the intranet, especially for certain frequently used web parts (Figure 5) as users were very keen on learning about all their capabilities. Special campaigns to introduce new features were run throughout the site by creating videos and providing articles and blogs about them, their benefits, and how to use them. This strategy has helped achieve a high adoption rate with the new features and improve the image of the SharePoint intranet as a whole. Webtrends usage statistics are now instrumental in the process to approve any additions to the intranet, and all existing features are carefully monitored to ensure they are continuing to provide value. FIGURE 5 Frequently Used Web Parts 5
The Results Project Outcomes and Benefits Realized BrightStarr has seen great success as a result of its partnership with Webtrends. The data that Webtrends provides creates a strong foundation on which to build innovative and effective solutions that directly impact our clients needs. This case study illustrates how BrightStarr was able to use Webtrends to plan, build, and execute an effective solution to help meet and exceed the client s success criteria in a quantifiable manner. Type of Challenge Before Webtrends After Webtrends Efficacy Multi-Lingual requirement International users barely accessed Corporate Intranet for most current information Intranet is available in multiple languages User access increased 35% Site Design Impractical and ineffective tools and sites took up valuable site real estate Redesigned web parts and site visuals based on popular usage Removed or decreased content that was not useful Search and IA Users spent extra time searching for information and documents Optimized Search Engine with Popular Search Items Designed Personalized Quick Links Number of clicks and time spent searching decreased Adopted by 40% of the company in the first week Corporate Video Campaign Videos didn't reach the whole company and video completion rate was low Decreased video length Main page Carousel supports video display Video completion increases 60% Viewership increased 75% Company News 12% of users could not view news and article carousel for quick updates News/Popular Articles are accessible to the whole organization All information is available for the whole company 6
About the Authors Kunaal Kapoor BrightStarr Vice President of Consulting, Mid-Atlantic Kunaal is a highly motivated and detail-oriented IT professional with proven leadership abilities. He has demonstrated expertise in analysis, development, and delivery of high-performance technology solutions. His exceptional attention to detail ensures strong project executions and smooth delivery. Kunaal currently heads the consulting practice for BrightStarr s Mid-Atlantic operations. He has shown tremendous leadership in his ability to develop standards by leveraging best practices and focusing on performance, accessibility as part of all custom SharePoint, Office 365, and Yammer solutions, along with integrating with several other technologies and products. Kunaal has a very unique ability to understand both business (end users) and technology to build best in-class solutions. He has a very solid development experience along with several SharePoint and ASP.NET certifications and speaks frequently in the SharePoint community events. Kip Wagner Senior Vice President Sales & Account Management Kip is a passionate sales leader that enjoys working with clients as much as he loves to build sales strategies and plan from the ground up. Kip joined the BrightStarr team to help the US organization ride its next wave of growth and success. Kip has more than 18 years of entrepreneurial start-up and consulting experience in B2B technology services and ISV s. Prior to joining BrightStarr, Kip served as Vice President of Sales for a Digital Agency where he helped create a national sales strategy for the company s SharePoint Services along with the development of the marketing strategy and indirect channel plan for the company s innovative Enterprise Social Media platform built on SharePoint. Kip s experience with Microsoft and the SharePoint product stack span back to 2007 where he was the VP of Sales for the East Coast for a large international Microsoft Gold-Certified Systems Integrator. While there he played a lead role in starting an Enterprise Services business unit focused on SharePoint which became a $25 million practice with a portfolio of more than 30 Fortune 500/1000 clients. 7
Contact North America 1 888 932 8736 sales@webtrends.com webtrends.com Europe, Middle East, Africa +44 (0) 1784 415 700 emea@webtrends.com Australia, Asia +61 (0) 3 9935 2939 australasia@webtrends.com For more than 20 years, Webtrends has helped companies make sense of their customer data to drive digital marketing success. By combining innovative technology with our team of trusted and creative advisors, our solutions are designed to provide actionable insights, increase customer engagement and boost revenue. We partner with companies at all levels of digital maturity and offer solutions in measurement and optimization. We work closely with approximately 2,000 global brands including Microsoft, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Kimberly-Clark, HSBC, Marks & Spencer, npower, BMW, Toyota, The Telegraph, Lastminute.com and many more. The results illustrated in this article are specific to the particular facts and circumstances of this customer. These facts and circumstances include, but are not limited to, the customer s business, industry, data input used and other factors as described herein. Each Webtrends customer s experience is unique based on business and technical variables and all statements must be considered non-typical. Actual savings, results, and performance characteristics will vary from customer to customer, depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. Webtrends does not guarantee or represent that every customer will achieve similar results. The only warranties for Webtrends products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements in the written agreement for such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Customers have shared their successes with Webtrends as part of an agreed-upon contractual exchange or project success summarization following their successful use of Webtrends solutions. Brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies. 8