The Sitecore Experience Awards recognise brands that have built truly customer-centric digital experiences with Sitecore technology. They are awarded to Sitecore customers and their partners whose entries clearly demonstrate that their Sitecore solution delivers an outstanding experience for all users from partner developers and internal customer marketers, to business and IT users and end-user customers.
This is the 11th Sitecore award for Codehouse.
The work
APM Terminals, part of A.P.Moller-Maersk, operates one of the world’s most comprehensive shipping terminal networks, with over 22,000 employees and a network of 76 ports globally. With more than a century of industry experience, APM Terminals helps both shipping line and landside customers grow their business and achieve better supply chain efficiency, flexibility and dependability.
Working in close partnership with APM Terminals, Codehouse worked on a new website, with white-labelling capability. Built on the Sitecore Experience Platform and hosted on Microsoft Azure PaaS, the website has been warmly received by staff and customers all around the world, and driven a huge increase in stickiness and engagement.
The email and SMS service for users to get updates and notifications for the terminals they have selected, using Sitecore Email Experience Manager (EXM), has enabled APM Terminals to comprehensively and safely manage customer communications remotely, which has been invaluable since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Designed to help customers quickly locate key terminal services, the interactive service locator map quickly and dynamically responds to the visitor’s preferences, showing them where they can find the services, as well as displaying additional information they may need to complete a transaction at the terminal. And the vessel schedule pages beautifully show track and trace details for incoming and outgoing ships based on their location in relation to reaching or leaving a port, with the data visually represented by a ship moving along a line to its destination. APM Terminals can also easily roll out additional websites for their managed terminals and services whenever they wish, in line with business growth.
The site includes an important API integration to follow exported and imported containers. The website infrastructure as code (IAC) can be deployed from Octopus – an automated deployment and release management tool – using ARM templates and PowerShell scripts. This custom Sitecore Azure PaaS development means everything is automated, so that APM Terminals can avoid the risks associated with manual intervention, and enjoy rapid deployment for any major updates or upgrades to their website in the future.
As a truly international business, developing our new website was an extremely challenging project, with multiple stakeholders involved, but thanks to a fantastic internal team at APM Terminals and a great partnership with Codehouse, we got it over the line. The website looks stunning and the response from customers has made all the hard work worthwhile
The results
In the first 12 months from launch, the new APM Terminals website has seen increases in KPIs across the board from users to sessions, and signs-ups to mobile traffic.
Total users in the first 12 months reached 1.5 million, up from 894,000 the year before - a 74.52% increase. The percentage of new users increased 81.88% and the number of sessions increased 19.51%. And, showing the benefits of spending a lot of time focusing on improving the experience for mobile devices, the site has seen an increase of 62.35% in mobile traffic.
APM Terminals saw a major increase in traffic starting in February as Covid-19 began to spread. From the period Feb-March 2020, they saw a 300% increase in users, increasing page views by 23%. The site handled this additional traffic without any direct incident or issue, and if they had needed to, the team could have responded quickly by increasing resources almost instantly within Azure.
The new operational alerts system for customers – using Sitecore, Sendgrid & IMI mobile to enable terminals to notify customers (e.g. Truck Drivers) of issues at the terminal that may affect their visit – provided a huge amount of sign-ups. Alerts were sent out via the user's preference, SMS or email. Within the first 12 months, APM Terminals saw 4,000 sign-ups to this service.
The Sitecore Experience Award
“In recent months, our world was forced to accelerate all digital efforts, making it more important than ever to make impactful human connections across channels as people look to navigate a shift to digital-first engagement,” said Paige O’Neill, Sitecore CMO.
The Sitecore Experience Awards celebrate some of the world’s leading brands and organisations who are using Sitecore technology to make essential connections with their audiences online by delivering relevant experiences through numerous different channels.
Sitecore Experience Award 2020 winners were selected, as they demonstrated to the judges that they used Sitecore solutions to make significant and measurable impact in terms of experience or content management.
Through the rigorous selection process, each entry was judged by a panel of Sitecore leadership from that entry’s region. There are five regions that evaluated and approved all regional selections based on specific selection and scoring criteria.
All category winners have been automatically entered for the Ultimate Experience Award, an honour given to entrants whose digital transformation has elevated the customer experience. The four Ultimate Experience Award Winners will be announced during Sitecore Symposium 2020 on 26-28 October.
Want to learn more?
Sitecore is an all-in-one digital experience platform that offers a best-of-breed content management system, commerce, personalisation, email campaign management, marketing automation, analytics, testing, and optimisation capabilities – all designed to help you attract, delight, and keep more customers.
Sitecore’s unified digital experience platform enables the world’s smartest brands to create compelling digital experiences that build more intimate relationships and cultivate loyal, lifetime customers.
As Sitecore experts, we’ve invested our efforts in Sitecore for over a decade – pretty much since it was born. We've mastered it to such a degree that we're one of the elite group of Sitecore partners who do it all, from design and build to ecommerce, personalisation, marketing optimisation, systems integration, and more. Our knowledge is unparalleled. We tap into our deep understanding of Sitecore to build tailored websites that achieve and exceed your digital goals.
If you’d like to know more about how we could help your organisation take advantage of Sitecore, just get in touch.
