Vista is rolling out a shiny new website, country by country, with a firm focus on customer experience (CX). Digital Analytics Lead for the Site and App Tracking and Enablement team, Hasnene Goulam, unpacks why the hard work is worth it.
New Vista, new platform
A towering monolith, Vistaprint’s once-powerful website lagged in performance. If our goal is to show small business owners the right solution at the right time, gallery loading wasn’t cutting it – to cite a critical CX moment. A user-shift towards tablet and mobile exacerbated this issue and more. Ahead of the rebrand to Vista in 2021, we committed to a new platform in 2019 alongside top-to-toe company reorganization, including the launch of DnA, our data-and-analytics team.
Vista’s new platform is versatile, based on micro-services, and easy to update. Users enjoy the newly optimized CX intrinsic to the website. In contrast, a global migration process will always be less neat. Our answer is to test and learn. We’re 10 markets in and tackling our meatiest challenge – America – which represents almost half of Vista’s global users.
Progress on the ground
What’s the rollout looked like so far? In simple terms, Ireland became our test for European markets, and recently, Canada was a good learning curve for the US launch. The new platform is also up and running across Australia, New Zealand, and the UK.
Another – and this time unplanned for – test ground was the pandemic. Vista quickly produced a standalone site offering face masks in each territory using the new platform’s technology. So while the pandemic caused some migration slowdown, it allowed us to take technical learnings and forecast against each country’s website.
Customer experience capability
The new platform is a sophisticated beast: it combines better end-to-end customer experience with website performance. We’ve improved gallery loading by 2-3 seconds, but that aside, it includes a retooled 360-view of customer needs through third-party services, with all the flexibility and efficiency that adds to site tracking, tracking strategy, and a fast-changing business brimming with questions.
Now our toolkit revolves around a customer data platform (CDP) enabled by Segment within which data and services flow. For instance, using Segment, we can unify our customer view to deliver accurate conversion measurements to advertising partners like Google, Facebook, Pinterest, and TikTok. And with Quantum Metric (QM), we’re getting deeper into customer behavior analytics to optimize the overall experience, in a cohort, on an individual level – AKA personalization. We’ve made great progress on real-time website personalization: having the data available and a website geared for performance is the right foundation.
Optimizing the future
Platform migration has been a catalyst for manifold advances, including enriched customer care via content or assistance, seamless user access to improved services like 99designs by Vista and graphic design software with VistaCreate, and faster development time – previously, readying a new feature could take a month or never. So, as we bid farewell to the monolith in this milestone year, the wins are already stacking up.
My team is keen to get started on a raft of projects that parallel Vista’s continued transformation. We’ll be implementing the latest version of Google Analytics, or GA4, expanding our usage of QM, deploying server-side tracking to measure user activity wherever it happens, and unifying Vista and partner data with each new Vista service. And we’ll get back to the business of building data products to provide data-driven insights. A 2022 goal is to craft a neat glossary-cum-tracking tool for analysts and stakeholders, to make complex data easy to understand. They’ll be able to self-serve answers without needing our team. We’ll also be focused on launching a mobile app – not a website duplicate but something of special value to Vista customers on the move. Stay tuned!
‘Site and app tracking and enablement’ isn’t the snappiest of labels. Our work can also be considered discreet and behind the scenes. But defining end-to-end measurement strategy makes us a pillar of leveraging data and in the spotlight for unlocking Vista’s progress. Our team has bite.
Look out for a summer update on website deployment learnings, read more Vista transformation stories on our blog, or explore jobs at DnA.