Enabling more non-technical staff to publish online with a flexible DXP solution

Facing increasing complexity in maintaining their website and offering more than a content platform, FMG needed to build a new, more flexible solution.

Lorna Hegarty 14 Sep 2022

Farmers’ Mutual Group

FMG has been an essential part of the New Zealand farming landscape since 1905. The organisation is 100% owned by rural members, with around 800 employees at 30 local offices throughout regional New Zealand, and has a 50% share of the rural insurance market in New Zealand.

Industry

Services

Products

CMS, Search

As a provider of rural insurance, the team at FMG is no strangers to the importance of being able to connect with customers in a way that suits their needs. With rural managers visiting clients at their properties, a call center, and multiple advertising and sponsorship opportunities in play at any time, they work hard to ensure that people know who they are and how to reach them.

Moving away from an inflexible website

However, as their website became an increasingly important part of their marketing mix, in terms of both promoting what they do and connecting with existing customers, they recognized the need to offer more from their digital platform. They also realized the complexity of doing so with their current provider.

Under their existing setup, any changes made to the website, which was last redeveloped in 2014, had to be done by an external provider, giving them little flexibility and creating additional expense with every change that needed to be made. Any feature introduced to facilitate a new campaign would come with a six to eight-week lead time, which the team simply couldn’t continue to contend with.

As subscribers to Gartner Research, the marketing team could stay across the different CMS and DXP providers available in the market and what they could offer. They created their shortlist from that research and, having explored the flexibility, support, and connectivity it could offer decided to move ahead with a Squiz DXP implementation.

Creating an integrated customer experience

With Squiz DXP, FMG has been able to leverage a ‘head optional’ content management architecture: head-on content management of their website, and headless content management of their customer portal, integrated into their own FMG Connect app for storing users’ data.

This strategy enables FMG to provide seamless customer journeys: orchestrating content delivery consistently through multiple channels, that are managed centrally with a single, user-friendly editing interface.

“The architecture of Squiz CMS impressed us,” explains Mark Stoneham, Senior Digital Marketing Specialist at FMG. “Particularly the fact that we could use it headless for our portal, but also head-on for our website as a full-blown CMS”.

The addition of Squiz DXP Search to the website has also ensured that visitors are able to find and act on information more quickly.

Online claim

Thanks to the integration capabilities of Squiz DXP, the website now also offers to visitors a claims flow that takes them through the full claim journey and, if applicable, allows them to make a claim online.

Being able to log in to the customer portal through the website means that customers can now access relevant information and make a claim at any time. This can reduce the turnaround time from a claim to a resolution to just a matter of hours in some cases, meaning customers can easily get on with their job without even having to speak to anyone at FMG.

Mark was ecstatic.

We saw an improvement in the website metrics. More engagement. More call-to-action uptake. More leads.

Empowering internal teams

The marketing team was also now able to make changes much more quickly. Relying on an in-house developer who is proficient in Squiz, they no longer have to rely on external support to make updates to the site.

Given the ease of use and collaboration the Squiz platform offers, the team has gone from having just a couple of people who were previously able to make any changes, to around 12 members of staff from across the business who can upload and manage content on the website, making them much more nimble and able to adapt to the changing needs of customers.

The local support of the Squiz team in Wellington has ensured that FMG is never without the help of an expert when needed and the ease of working with both the team and the platform has enabled them to consider other, future projects and platform capabilities.

Mark concludes: “Our experience working with Squiz has been very positive. It felt like a partnership. A great bunch of people, very professional and really interested in making it work for your business and your organization.”