Modernizing Medical Supply Distribution with Powerful Self Service

The Solution

The Approach

HCL Business Partner, Asponte Technology, worked with Penn Vet through every step of the digital experience modernization project. The project started with a design-thinking workshop that defined user personas, created journey maps, outlined requirements for site functionality, and established initial user experience guidance that jumpstarted the overall project.

Design and development of the new site was completed in phases using agile development. This offered a great opportunity to focus each phase on a specific purpose or function of the website and build the site as if they were completing a story.

The Asponte and Penn Vet team started with the homepage, worked through finding products, adding them to a cart, checking out an order, and then creating the remaining value add features. Asponte leveraged out-of-the-box features in the HCL Digital Experience platform whenever possible and created custom java portlets to supplement any gaps in functionality required.

The new digital experience channel for Penn Vet is as full-service as calling a sales representative. The site offers ordering capabilities, order tracking, user preference-based notifications, equipment and replacement part management, loyalty program tracking, bill pay, user management, and product returns.

This is all running on HCL Digital Experience which has allowed Penn Vet to seamlessly bring together in one place its product catalog, with >12K categorized products, and its ERP system. This provides a personalized experience with knowledge of the customer’s purchase history and more — and one that is intuitive for customers. It also makes the product information readily available for sales representatives so they can better guide their customers through to purchase.

In addition to purchase history analytics there are many other personalization options throughout the site such as saving favorite product promotions, creating shopping lists, and choosing how products display in search results. Unica, which is integrated with DX, is the place where all product promotions are entered. It helps serve as the engine to show promotions only to eligible customers. This gives them a seamless DX experience for viewing products, seeing promotions related to them, and being prompted to complete promotions if they have items in their cart on promo, but haven’t satisfied all of the promotion criteria when they reached the shopping cart. This has helped to increase customer satisfaction, improve conversion rates and encourage return visits to the website. Penn Vet can now scale up its operation by servicing many site visitors simultaneously or asynchronously with efficiency and ease.

Thanks to the integration of Web Content Manager and their ERP system, to share content information and updates, Penn Vet is now able to publish new products to its website in minutes. In fact, with the integration between DX and their ERP, many product updates happen automatically once a product is published to the website and doesn’t require content author interaction anymore to keep the ERP and website in sync.

Additionally, content owners can use the easy drag-and-drop tools to modify product information and website look and feel and make it available to customers immediately.