This case study originally appeared on CIO News
CEAT Tyres, founded in 1958, is one of India’s leading tyre brands. The company is driven by the purpose of helping the world move safely and smartly and with more than 400 exclusive outlets, it provides products and services across over 110 countries. To connect with its customers worldwide and promote direct sales, CEAT Tyres and DEPT® built a market-leading direct-to-consumer platform with Adobe Experience Cloud. From strategy to go-live, it took less than three months.
Keeping pace with the dynamic consumer market
While online shopping is becoming the norm in many industries, most consumers still buy their tyres in person. That trend also holds true for CEAT Tyres, which manufactures tyres for many types of vehicles – including cars, bicycles, and commercial trucks – and sells them either directly or through partners.
Nevertheless, the company noticed that there is a small but growing number of customers who want to purchase tyres online and just as importantly, most customers do their research online. Hence, a strong digital presence was a must for CEAT Tyres.
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted how quickly costumer’s (online) needs change and evolve. Therefore, CEAT Tyres was focused on finding a solution that provided the power and flexibility needed to support changing digital requirements over the next several years, including e-commerce capabilities and regional websites.
Building a high-performing website in less than three months
DEPT®, an Adobe Solutions Partner, took on the challenge and worked closely with CEAT Tyres to support its digital transformation.
At the beginning, during the discovery phase, we did extensive research to understand the company’s broad tyre catalogue, explore customer needs, and make a plan for establishing e-commerce, including planning how internal processes such as billing and delivery should be handled.
Together with CEAT Tyres, we then agreed to a two-phased approach to accelerate the digital transformation. First, the team built an informational, mobile-first website using Adobe Experience Manager Sites. Second, they focused on bringing the e-commerce capabilities live with Adobe Commerce, including dealer integration with Salesforce.
As CEAT Tyres is a major sponsor of the IPL – India’s professional cricket league – it wanted the first phase website online quickly to take advantage of the additional name recognition and potential web traffic during the IPL season. In just two and a half months, our team built the website from the ground up with Adobe Experience Manager.
Optimising the website experience
CEAT Tyres chose a headless implementation, which enables customer-facing channels to reliably connect to APIs on the backend to efficiently deliver the exact experiences customers need, regardless of how and where they access services. The DEPT® team first brought the product catalogue out of the company’s SAP ERP system and into Adobe Commerce using APIs. They then wrote a GraphQL layer to pull the data from Adobe Commerce into Experience Manager in a headless manner, creating an experience layer in Experience Manager to help customers search for products.
One of the biggest benefits of working with Adobe Experience Manager Sites is the speed of creating or updating content such as copy, images, tables, or menus that can be reused across pages. CEAT Tyres analyses CX with Adobe Analytics and uses these insights to optimise the website for a growing number of customers. Changes can be made rapidly, and changes made to one content fragment can be propagated across all pages. Templates take advantage of mobile-first design techniques for sites that display beautifully on any screen size.
CEAT Tyres frequently releases new campaigns and celebrity endorsements to announce new models of tyres or highlight existing tyre lines. With Adobe Experience Manager Sites, they can plan and create new campaign pages within a week. The templates allow them to work much more cost-effectively and efficiently, leading to significantly faster time-to market.
All web content is stored in Experience Manager Assets, creating a central hub to find content when needed. The Dynamic Media functionality in Experience Manager Assets takes advantage of artificial intelligence to transform media for all screens. For instance, Dynamic Media automatically creates multiple renditions of each image file to create images that are the right size for every screen. It also optimises the file size, maximising loading speeds for all website customers.
The frequent updates and optimised web experiences have helped CEAT Tyres to improve its SEO rankings and improve its website performance dramatically:
35%
Bounce Rate (before: 60%)
9.5%
CTR (before: 5%)
Reaching customers worldwide
To further expand its digital reach, CEAT Tyres launched its first international website in 2022. The multi-site manager feature and multilingual capabilities will make it easier for the brand to continue creating and managing website variations for different regions and languages. Eventually, CEAT Tyres hopes to expand to around a dozen countries and 20 languages to reach all of its major markets.
Conclusion
With the support of DEPT®, CEAT Tyres launched a new website in just a few months with Adobe Experience Manager Sites and Experience Manager Assets in Adobe Experience Cloud. The site soon expanded with e-commerce capabilities from Adobe Commerce, also part of Experience Cloud, turning it into a powerful customer touchpoint where customers all over the world can research, purchase, and plan the delivery of tyres.
DEPT® stood out as a skilled vendor with the experience to handle all of our website and e-commerce goals. Their team advised us on potential opportunities for how we could develop the website and engage customers and worked with us on best practices for all of our day-to-day activities.
Vidur Anand, Digital Sales and Customer Experience Lead, CEAT Tyres
Questions?
CTO – APAC & DEPT® Adobe Practice
Yash Mody
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