Vertic
Catalyzing Successful Digital Transformations

Creating Digital Powerhouses to Accelerate Customer Experience

As an ace in digital marketing strategy, Vertic has been instrumental in providing successful digital transformation for numerous companies for over a decade now. The company enables clients to build their brands, provide superior customer experience and generate tangible business results by creating interactive and innovative design. As part of digital transformation projects, the company provides website creation, mobile solutions, social media implementations, digital campaigns, visual and interaction design, and most importantly continuous monitoring and optimization. Being a Sitecore Solution Partner, Vertic utilizes the Sitecore platform as the building block for much of their website creation. The company has completely transformed B2B brands, turning the brochure-like website experience to become an attractive digital powerhouse that impacts every aspect of the business and lures in end-customers. In this way Vertic helps its clients to build an emotional bond with their customers, earning their trust and making them want to come back again. The company primarily caters to three verticals—technology, industrial, and healthcare—with the majority of their clients being Fortune 500 companies. In the following conversation with Sebastian Jespersen, Founder and CEO at Vertic, he shares interesting insights into the challenges that are faced by enterprises today and how Vertic tackles those challenges.

How do you help clients transform from traditional to digital strategy and what are the painpoints you address?

We are often approached with a need for a new dot com, yet our discussion moves to that of digital transformation. We start with three main topics: Commercial Excellence—to impact and support the company’s sales performance; Operational Excellence—to reduce operating and maintenance costs; and Brand Elevation—to increase the brand awareness and elevate the conversation from transactional to value adding. Building a dot com that creates business impact requires a much-defined process of working, which includes getting a deep understanding of the company, the industry and the different key structural challenges. This involves interviewing the executive team about the business objectives and strategy, and then translating these into digital objectives and KPIs for the new website. Within these KPIs we note the crucial points for ongoing adjustments, optimizations and business impact reporting. Once the objectives are converted to a KPI model that governs the entire process, we begin building the .COM strategy, leveraging our “outside-in perspective” approach that focuses on understanding stakeholder needs and decision journeys. We then identify the content that is in demand, and map it to the customer’s decision journey, to ensure the user on the website is constantly fed with relevant information, bringing them closer to the brand and to conversion. It is crucial for the content to be created using the customer’s own vocabulary and taxonomy, and not the company’s own or internal terminology.

This approach brings all the difference in the market as opposed to other dot-com providers that follow an inside-out model where the website is constructed based on the company’s own internal organization (functions, departments etc.), which is counterintuitive for website visitors. Going back to the KPI framework I mentioned, we continually refer back to it as we continue to support our clients with website performance as well as other digital activities that complement the .COM work. Keeping their business objectives in mind (from commercial and operational excellence, and Brand), we collaborate with our client in identifying what will accelerate their digital transformation journey post the .COM. What we are finding to be extremely successful and impactful are ABM programs. Especially for B2B companies that are looking to digitize their sales process and bring down costs while achieving commercial excellence and bringing more qualified leads to their sales team.

Please walk us through your solutions concerning its core functionalities.

As already mentioned, we take an outside-in perspective, so we understand the customer’s needs, how long their decision cycle is. For example, if you take a client like SAP, where they have long decision cycles—it takes months and sometimes even years to choose enterprise software. Supporting longer decision cycles with customization and personalization helps tailor the content and offerings according to the clients’ requirements and where they are in their journey. Today, customers look for specific content based on specific needs, and the website’s job is to make it easy to find what you are looking for and get the information you need and will be needing. We work closely with our clients to ensure that when the user searches on a site for a specific term, the website should be able to understand the intent behind the search and provide the right content to help them in their decision journey, making it object-oriented. In a complex world it should be easy to find what you are looking for on a dot com.

Could you share a customer success story?

There is a very famous case study that we have created with LEO Pharma—Sitecore also uses it as one of the best examples of a user interface experience engine that was built on their platform. We created a solution that customizes itself all the way down to the specific user profile, truly omni-channel across site, email, even nurse phone calls, irrespective of the interaction channel. Another compelling solution that we created was for a biotech company called CSL.com. The client was operating within rare diseases and wanted to convey a story that is patient-centric. We created a distinct UI, design, and ability to box information according to the intent specified by the user.

What do you think makes Vertic surge ahead of its competitors?

We are a different to alot of IT houses. We have the combined skillset of understanding business and their audience, with strong capabilities in UX and design, enabling us to create impactful solutions. For us, the most important thing is to go out and tell the companies that the dot-com is the spine of the digital communication infrastructure. Today, we do not go online anymore, but we live online–and if we do live online, then capturing “Share of Life™” becomes the vital objective for enterprises to have a long-term relationship with their customers, irrespective of whether they are a B2B or B2C company. To sum it up, the reason we are winning clients like GE, SAP, Microsoft, Eli Lilly or CSL, is because we understand their business and business objectives, and can then define what the website should do for the company’s objectives. Based on our deep expertise in .COM best practice, we are also currently creating a .COM Index that compares corporate websites of companies from the F500 and enables them to benchmark themselves against one another. This index will be launched in January 2019 and will be found on http://ranking.vertic.com

What is the vision for the future?

One of the exciting areas that we are looking at right now is voice-controlled UX and how will it affect the dot-com navigation. Another area is the impact of UX/UI with respect to IoT, which will connect to the overarching digital communication infrastructure. We are anticipating that the best interface in the future could be no interface at all.