PolyOne Boosts Sales and Marketing Effectiveness with Discoverable Web Information

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I just returned today from a week-long vacation.  We released a new case study from PolyOne while I was away.  This case study is about PolyOne overhauling their customer-facing B2B website, and using Microsoft products and technologies to do it.

Their business challenges were around three main areas:

  • The ability to quickly post new content and change existing content to better serve their customers and shareholders
  • The ability for customers and prospective customers to quickly find product information whether through the product hierarchy or through keyword searches
  • The ability to achieve a global presence with their website including the Chinese marketplace, which is a huge growth opportunity for the company

They worked with Microsoft partner, Blue Chip Consulting Group, to migrate their web site over to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.  Using SharePoint, they were able to shift responsibility of content changes to the web site from 2 IT folks (who could work on more strategic things) to the content creators.  This allowed them to improve the response time of refreshing content from days or weeks down to seconds.

A second benefit was migrating their separate Chinese website into this single global site.  This allows PolyOne to centralize where content is deployed and updated and they no longer have to worry about maintaining separate regional sites, and duplicating the content for each.  The former approach led to out-of-date information, and inconsistent information between sites.

For search, they found that SharePoint handled all of the capabilities they needed, and it was integrated into this single solution.  This allowed them to forgo having a Google search appliance - and a separate environment to support and maintain.  They have found their search relevancy close to 98% - a big improvement over their past experience.

One final consideration and benefit, was that 90% of the new PolyOne site was built from configuration rather than custom-code.  This will be a huge benefit to them down the road when they want to upgrade.

Thanks to PolyOne for sharing their story.