In recent months, businesses have been challenged with finding new ways to balance workloads with reduced resources while also being expected to deliver results. With uncertainty still high, organizations have leaned more on digital partners as a means of differentiating and competing in their respective industries.
At C2, Continuous Support and Optimization (known as "CSO") offers an all-access pass to expertise across C2’s team – UX and design, front- and back-end development, CMS, and more – to support a wide range of both regular and ad hoc needs. As organizations look to get more done with less, here are several ways clients have engaged C2’s support team to continue driving business results:
#1. Making the Physical Digital
The outbreak of COVID-19 forced a change of plans for graduating seniors and their schools. With graduation at risk, Central Community College (Nebraska) transformed its traditional ceremony into a virtual celebration through C2’s monthly support offering. CCC launched three new templates that powered the interactive web experience, including a revised approach to its existing directory page, a new social media wall, and individual profiles to allow graduates to share accomplishments and awards. A virtual guestbook allowed friends and family to offer their encouragement and well wishes.
#2. Optimize Search & Navigation
A manufacturing client was interested in optimizing its search to get visitors to quickly accomplish their goals. We helped by configuring Optimizely (Episerver) Search & Navigation to use autocomplete, search as they type, offer "did you mean?" suggestions, and surface recommended content (PDFs, articles, specifications, rich media, and other documents) to present the most relevant search results. This helped to personalize each experience in its own unique way while enabling visitors to get the information they want when they need it.
#3. Introducing Web Personalization
Looking to introduce web personalization with the Optimizely (Episerver) platform, we helped a consumer goods multi-brand make the most of Optimizely's built-in Visitor Groups to start promoting recommended content and products to users based on defined audience types. Analytics about individual visits and on-site behavior help further test and refine personalization efforts to ensure the client meets customers with the right content or offer at the right time.
#4. Improving Engagement and Operations
A municipality was interested in creating a new process for filing a police report online. Originally a one-page layout with low engagement, the client sought to make it more interactive by guiding users step-by-step through a series of questions. While built with this in mind, the “choose your own adventure”-style widget can now be easily re-used for different purposes throughout the site.
#5. Optimizing What You Already Have
In the transition of migrating platforms, a manufacturing client wished to enhance its library of product literature so users could locate product information more easily. Existing in two different spots on the site, documents in its ‘Resources’ page are being consolidated with the ‘Literature’ page and optimized with additional filters including by resource type, keyword search, product categories, and more.
#6. Staying Current with the Latest Features
Many clients use ongoing support to upgrade to the latest version of their CMS software. By iteratively introducing and updating minor changes, users can avoid a larger overhead or costly project that would be necessary down the road to catch back up. Keeping up on current releases often resolves any issues that would otherwise be a bug and allows clients to take advantage of the newest features and functionality.
#7. Automating Tasks to Drive Productivity
Many platforms offer everything a marketer needs to deliver great customer experiences, but sometimes additional customization can enable greater efficiencies on the back end. C2 helped a client enable automated meta descriptions, social media cards, open graph tags, among other SEO-reliant metadata to pre-populate based on specific content entry fields. Content editors can then override and modify data to their liking. By automating repetitive tasks, but allowing for control, content entry is much more efficient and optimized for SEO best practices.
#8. Enhancing Communications for Key Audiences
The need for timely messaging and alerting has become an urgent need for municipalities, government agencies, health care, and education. Some of our education clients have worked with C2 support to add flexible alerting capabilities to their websites. Using colors to indicate urgency (low, medium, and high), timely messaging can be pushed quickly and easily to improve communications to important audiences.
#9. Driving Conversion Rates
Clients don’t always have the resources to review and interpret their analytics into actionable recommendations. Continuous Support and Optimization allows C2 to help clients find opportunities to enhance their content or user experience. For example, a client was interested in improving a landing page form. Pairing Google Analytics with a visual analytics tool, like HotJar, C2 was able to identify barriers to form completion and optimized the experience with a shorter page and multi-step form for increased guidance, engagement, and completion.
#10. Maintaining Compliance and Mitigating Risk
As people continue to rely on digital channels to complete tasks, access information, and consume goods or services, organizations have realized how critical it is to provide a usable and inclusive web experience. Many clients, particularly in higher education, take advantage of C2 web accessibility services to identify and remediate potential accessibility issues as lawsuits against inaccessible websites continue to rise.