The Opportunity
With hundreds-of-thousands page views per month, Suzuki knew they needed to better serve their site visitors, improve their online brand experience, and start sharing more engaging information to convert those visitors.
Our mission was to create an “online showroom”, providing visitors the experience they expect when they enter brick-and-mortar showrooms. Through custom app development and AWS Cloud migration, we were going to make searching for products easy while highlighting the Suzuki brand and experienced service they provide in store.
Key Challenges
SMIPL’s legacy website was extremely dated, not user-friendly, built on a .NET framework, and very expensive to maintain. The pages were hard-coded and not able to accept Excel or CSV file uploads, resulting in manual entry of hundreds of product details for dozens of SKU’s. Not to mention the tedious tasks required to deal with product special editions or different taxation rules applicable in different regions!
The website had an exceedingly slow load resulting in exceptionally high bounce rates. 90% of sales inquiries, service questions, and customer service was being handled through their Facebook page, which received up to 1,000 queries a day!
The marketing team was struggling with unhappy customers, the web team was stuck updating products by re-writing lines of code individually, and the business was turning off prospects with a sub-par infrastructure.
The Solution
The previous application built on .NET was hosted on Azure, their CMS was also initially put on the Azure Platform. Before our partnership, they even upgraded to a standalone server – a high-end 16 core CPU with 56 GB RAM – but their environment was still incapable of efficient scaling and reliable performance.
Combining Suzuki’s key parameters and objectives with the current challenges, we designed a new architecture taking into account their current choice of CMS. Re-engineering the CMS and the website on Pimcore — at the time a relatively new open-source platform using PHP with the best of Zend Framework and Symfony.
Migration to AWS Cloud of the complete application meant visitors to their site were served promptly and without page load delays.
Our custom app development involved building an admin dashboard featuring single-source and multi-channel publishing functionality. Giving them the ability to manage information while integrating content and data from various sources. Acting as a platform for CaaS (Content as a Service). Helping to maintain the integrity of the extensible design requirements.
The application auto-scalable by using a custom plugin to store static assets in the cloud and serve the end user via CDN (Content Delivery Network), improving overall performance.
The Results
Suzuki was provided with a “virtual showroom” enabling 360-degree product views and modern web presence that appealed to its target audience – young and tech-savvy consumers. Prospective customers now had access to all the latest products, offers and nearby dealers at the touch of a button.
Users had the option of “visiting” local dealers by using the intuitive location-aware dealer locator and could now book a test ride online, with zero friction.
Suzuki employees could easily update product data through an easy to use admin interface. While also using the same portal as a management dashboard to monitor the performance of their marketing campaigns.
We were able to study and analyze the query patterns and visitor behavior alongside a competitive landscape to design a custom website focusing on improving the user experience. The complete application was hosted on AWS Cloud and was geared to scale up, improving site uptime to 99.99% and lowering the infrastructure cost by 30% of the original cost.
99.99%
Site uptime
30%
TCO Reduction/Monthly
About The Customer
As one of the top two-wheeler manufacturers in India, SMIPL’s (Suzuki Motorcycle India Private Limited) online presence was under-serving a massive market and not an accurate reflection of the quality, performance, and reliability the brand and its products are known for worldwide.
Founded in 1909, Suzuki is one of the most prolific motorcycle manufacturers in the world, with extremely popular models like the Hayabusa and GSX-R. Suzuki is an industry leader in key customer segments such as street scooters, dirt bikes, cruisers, ATVs and quads.
