Introduction
As a software company offering data solutions focused on people analytics, Visier is on a mission to help employers better understand the dynamics of their organizations and enable teams in a way that facilitates results and drives individual growth. Empowerment at the micro and macro level — from individuals to teams — is at the core of this mission.
But with the rise of hybrid and remote work, things have changed. Organizations and team members spread across time and space are struggling to interact effectively and meet business goals. Visier, too, has struggled with this — which led the company to develop modern ways to empower its own team while addressing new challenges faced by clients from around the globe.
Communication has become increasingly virtual. Video calls are replacing meetings, work hours are staggered, and many enterprises allow their people to live anywhere, as long as the work can be accomplished. Digital spaces, like websites, have to fill more functions — effectively. Visier’s site was falling short and the effects were felt internally and externally.
Waving goodbye to WordPress
For too long, Visier’s WordPress-powered website didn’t allow or empower individuals and teams to create and manage content autonomously. Over the years, well-meaning team members worked around the system’s shortcomings by installing a range of plug-ins and extensions to the system. For example, changing the appearance of web pages required extensive back-end coding. Supporting additional content types required installing third-party solutions.
The result was a clunky system with content in static pages that had to be manually updated. Updates were time-consuming and error-prone. Instead of focusing on enhancing its digital experience, team members spent most of their time ensuring they were updating the right pages at the right time.
When Tyler Roehmholdt, Senior Director of Digital Experience, joined the company, he decided it was time for a new approach that would enable Visier’s teams to better deliver results.
“I was really wanting to break away from the idea that a website is just about publishing content,” Roehmholdt said. “It's about having extensible, scalable, malleable, and portable content that can be used in many different ways, in many different locations, in many different facets. Looking at that, it was very obvious WordPress wasn't going to do that for us.”
Automating and scaling needs for the Visier website
By moving to Contentful, the Visier team was able to scale their web presence to meet changing business needs and reach new markets quickly and reliably.
“We have new ideas and new initiatives constantly,” Chief Marketing Officer Jake Sorofman said. “It's just the nature of how we operate and how we're growing as we diversify our business. There are new geographies, new products, new markets, new segments, and new ideas — things that we're testing, things that we're not going to know until we put it out in the wild.”
Moving from enabling publishing to empowering innovation
Visier harnessed the customization potential created by composable content by moving its website to Contentful.
“What really landed me on Contentful was the ability to deliver a major level of customization,” Roehmholdt said. “We go in and we can have a single piece of content that can be used in a myriad of ways. We had a process where it took five different people to create a resource landing page. With Contentful, we have a single content type that houses everything we need in a single entity and we can use it 500 different ways.”
But that customization was only the beginning. By adopting Contentful, Visier’s content publishing became exponentially quicker. Previously, posting a new resource to the site — whether it was a simple graphic or PDF — took days and collaboration between multiple teams. Today, it’s a five-minute process that requires just two people. This dramatic savings in time and human resources creates new efficiency that allows Visier’s teams to drive more results rather than focusing on overcoming technical hurdles.
“The exciting part is, we can start to think of solving problems in different ways,” Roehmholdt said. “Rather than saying, ‘Okay, we've got content and we have a page design and we have to shove that content into that design,' we can now say, ‘Let’s build something that matches the goal and matches the outcome that we want through content modeling.’ Then, we can build the experience around that and tap into it from different angles.”
Enabling content orchestration
Contentful has also allowed Visier to construct individualized editing experiences that empower team members to update what they’re working on. By configuring the editorial interface to limit the number of options available, Visier ensures inadvertent changes aren’t made to the site.
Additionally, Contentful’s orchestration capabilities — which serve as guardrails — allow Visier team members to build with confidence, knowing that they can deliver their creative vision. It has also allowed the team to move from relying on updates to static pages to building dynamic content, all powered by Contentful. These changes encourage teams to adopt new ways of working.
“It really has been an interesting and really rewarding experience because you're not restricting people to this traditional idea of, ‘Hey, I've got a story to tell.’ And you say ‘Great. Send me your static HTML,’” Roehmholdt said. ”Now it’s become, ‘Let's sit down and talk about the story you want to tell. Let's talk about how you want to express yourself and how you want your team, or your product, your message to be received.’”
That ability to think holistically about the digital experience rather than focusing on technical constraints has already delivered results for the software company. For example, one of Visier’s teams developed a new approach to building flexible content pages that aim to increase organic search rankings for key terms. Similar to pillar pages, this approach allows content creators to edit content freely or build out new pages on their own by mixing and matching pre-built modules within Contentful. This has resulted in an explosion of content tailored to support Visier’s spectrum of customer personas and their journeys.
Building for the future
Visier wants to change the way the world works. Contentful has enabled Visier to create an environment in which its whole team can focus on its mission, its clients, and the best way to communicate and drive change. Instead of being constrained by a legacy CMS, teams are empowered to deliver their creative vision within guardrails that create confidence and deliver fidelity on the final product. In turn, that empowerment changes the way teams think about their work, allowing them to deliver creative results rather than focusing on the barriers that might stand in their way to success.
