• Solution & Case Studies
• Worthing Borough Council
• National Inventory of Architectural Heritage
• University of Portsmouth
• OPW Heritage Ireland
• Specsavers Optical Group
• Bahrain Ministry of Information

WCMS Reducing Lead Times and Driving Down Costs

www.specsavers.co.uk

Specsavers Optical Group is the biggest optical retailer in the UK. It is also the biggest of the four major opticians that control 70% of the British market for spectacles and contact lenses, with Specsavers having a 39% share of the market. The company has over 1,000 stores across 10 countries.

Requirements

Specsavers set a huge challenge in overhauling its global web presence, while still maintaining an interactive and engaging brand support and online shopping experience for its expanding customer base.   The enormous scale of the project required a strategic partnership with an enterprise web content management provider to make these plans a reality. Specsavers wanted to ensure that the site would feature contemporary and consistent branding and give users a more personal and interactive experience.

Process, challenges and solutions

Specsavers currently operates in 10 countries around the world including the UK, the Netherlands, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland.  Previously, each of the websites supporting these countries had been administered by a central web team.  In order to foster integration and collaboration across all websites, Specsavers decided to invest in an enterprise web content management system to enable countries and departments to become responsible for their own content.  With content authors scattered across continets Specsavers administrators sought a comprehensive web content management solution (WCMS) that would improve the web site efficiencies and effectiveness.

TERMINALFOUR was selected to provide this service after a highly competitive global tendering process. TERMINALFOUR Site Manager offers an ease-of-use that puts the power to publish back into the hands of the brand custodians including marketing, PR and other content providers.  This allows Specsavers development team to redirect their skills to more strategic level IT activities. TERMINALFOUR was selected based on the efficiency of its software and its impressive portfolio of commercial clients. Their Site Manager enterprise content management system was chosen, primarily because of its ease-of-use, yet powerful feature set.

With Specsavers sites ranging across 10 different countries, the project posed multi language requirements. Site Manager forms part of a select group of content management systems that are able to successfully manage large multilingual websites. Its scalability ensures that Site Manager can successfully manage a vast volume of content with minimum effort. Its full multilanguage support streamlines content management on large multilingual websites. The success of the project also hinged on providing the site with contemporary and consistent branding and its ability to give users a more personal and interactive experience.

The outcome

Site Manager enabled Specsavers to clone the 'master' website across jurisdictions, while also allowing the flexibility to cater to individual country language, regulatory and cultural factors. Site Manager enabled Specsavers’ many contributors to take ownership of their online content. Information can be updated and changed with ease and with minimal technical aptitude, thereby allowing an enriched user experience and more comprehensive and timely communications.

The system also enabled consistency in brand representation, while integrating with Specsaver's in-house customer relationship systems and streamlined online order processing.  This includes an innovative 'try on our frames' option, which offers customers the ability to upload their image and superimpose glasses from the entire Specsavers range.  Since the site went live, five million frames have been tried.

Chris Corbin, Specsavers IT Accounts Manager, said, "The open source ethos behind TERMINALFOUR has given our developers the flexibility to integrate and customise every element of the project to our exact needs.  As a result, Site Manager has expedited the project by removing the complexities and barriers to development, ultimately reducing lead times and driving down costs."