Personalized CX for a Life Sciences Company

Business challenge

Before working with an Acquia and Axelerant partnership, the customer worked with another vendor using Site Factory. Unfortunately, their users in local markets and brand agencies were facing difficulties with the more technical aspects of Drupal and Site Factory, and the velocity of site deployment was slower than expected. 

To build a scalable and easy to use multisite platform, the customer chose Acquia’s Site Studio as their low code site builder tool. Site Studio offers an intuitive interface for content editors along with portable configurations. These configurations can be captured and exported as packages and reused on other sites. We leveraged this aspect and created packages that could be reused as applicable.

Site launches could happen faster with this simplified process while ensuring a consistent look and feel. At the same time, sites built on Site Studio are less prone to developer errors. In addition to their goal of achieving sustainable in-house self-service to decrease dependencies, the customer wanted to achieve the following objectives:
 

A large number of sites, the need for personalized user journeys, and the need for identity management added to the project’s complexity.
 

Solution

The Website Factory is a tool that the customer wanted to allow users to build and manage sites in a consolidated UI. This would involve Drupal, Site Studio, decoupled components, and a Self Service Portal (SSP) to accelerate site-building. 

Creating a package and a set of components for one group of sites was significantly faster than creating a theme by doing actual development. The team chose the automated Site Studio package import mechanism during site installation and update to manage Site Studio configurations. In this system, while Site Factory handles site creation and Drupal handles the backend, Site Studio substitutes the theming effort completely, adding extra features like a ready to use content editor, enabling users to create content and style it. 

All users have to do is go to the tool, initiate the site creation process, choose which site template to use (this will instruct Site Factory to create a site with that profile), and then select which Site Studio package to use. 

At the beginning of the engagement, around 2,000 bugs had accumulated over some time. Through this engagement, we provided the customer with a stable platform, high-velocity site creation, and fewer issues reported.
 

Results

The project began in September 2019, and close to 400 sites are already live.

Project Highlights

A large Number Of Sites

Of the approximately 1500 sites that needed to be built on Drupal, some were for brands in multiple markets, which posed the need for multilingual support. Consequently, the sites had both common and unique requirements. 

The team identified the standard requirements and created a base Site Studio package for individual sites to use. Then, based on the sites’ unique needs, they added brand and style Site Studio packages. Unique collections of base, brand, and style packages constituted the site templates that are used on the SSP to create a site.

These are the key steps the team undertook: 

1. Created a base Site Studio package for all the sites.
2. Created a brand package (on top of the base package) for individual brand sites with personalized design and UI requirements.
3. Created multiple site templates in the SSP, which consisted of installation profiles and Site Studio package information to use during site creation. 
4. Other metadata, like language, brands, target country, site-specific credentials, and configuration, etc, can be specified during site creation and are not part of the SSP template itself.
    

Identity Management

In the healthcare space, multiple countries have individual identity providers (IDPs) for certified professional services. The customer wanted these professionals to be able to adopt and be onboarded to their sites easily. 

Gigya is a third-party integration that provided the Custom Identity and Access Management (CIAM) platform where some of these IDPs were already integrated. It also allows for custom IDP integrations. 

The team used Gigya CIAM in the federated identity management system (FIDM) mode, which allows subscribers to use the same identification data to access multiple domains on the network.

Gigya integrates with common social media identity providers such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, etc. It also integrates with domain-specific identity providers such as SwissRX, DocCheck for European countries, etc, and provides a platform that enables it to integrate with custom identity providers.

The team used Gigya FIDM as their uniform Identity provider and connected to it using the OpenID logging mechanism.

Personalized Customer Journey

Platform sites are targeted to multiple user types. These are identified via user information like profession, country, etc. This information is gathered from user profile data coming via Gigya CIAM, or the user explicitly providing the information via consent buttons, CTA buttons, passcode values, etc. 

Based on this user information, personalization includes:

• Personalized journey and navigation 
• Personalized content delivery 
• Content access control

At the time of writing, there was no integration between Site Studio and Acquia Lift to fulfill personalization needs. The team used the Context module to its fullest to personalize the user journey and content.

Site Studio has an OOTB integration with the Drupal Context module. Site Studio-Context integration allows conditional visibility of page building elements.