Rewiring Customer Experience Delivery at Blue Yonder

Blue Yonder is the world’s leading end-to-end digital supply chain platform provider, enabling companies to better predict and pivot to quickly fulfill customer demand. Founded in 1985, the company works with businesses worldwide, including 73 of the top 100 retailers and 8 of the top 10 third-party logistics (3PL) companies.

Fulfilling a new brand promise at every touchpoint

JDA Software was a 35-year-old company in the midst of a transformation. Rebranding under the name Blue Yonder in early 2020, the once traditional supply chain software company was promising digital transformation and a faster, more contextually-aware experience for its customers.

The company’s own transformation was marked by a series of shifts: the pivot to a cloud platform, the infusion of artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities into its products, and a move to a subscription-based software model.

As a company, Blue Yonder produces hundreds of pieces of content each year that support their broad and evolving solutions portfolio. People often search for content tied to specific products or topics, which includes information about planning, commerce, and logistics. The search was tuned to “recency” meaning newer items appeared first on the search page. Older items that might be more accurate were almost impossible to find.

The same search for the external website also powered “Brand Central Station.” The internal-facing site is the go-to spot for everything marketing. This is the place where the more than 5,300 Blue Yonder employees go to find logos, templates, approved stock imagery, and more. With a rebranding underway, consistency in brand expression was top of mind, and yet people struggled to find the exact asset they needed.

Whether it was customers or employees, the custom Lucene-based search wasn’t bringing people to the answers they needed quickly, garnering complaints almost daily. With a newly empowered customer and a shift in its messaging and strategy, Blue Yonder was looking to update their digital presence to match the evolving nature of their business, brand, and customer expectations.

Creating a common content search inside-and-out

Coveo was initially brought in to take the website search experience to the next level, away from a custom-built solution that was difficult to maintain and not meeting customer needs. While old search delivered the most recent content first, Coveo’s machine learning delivers the most relevant results first – and the content people actually want. Ultimately, this positive experience and drop in complaints sparked an opportunity to expand the application of AI-powered search enterprise-wide.

Using Coveo as the foundation for its content search – both internal and external – not only improved access, but produced a wealth of big-picture data and insights regarding the user journey. All the ways people interact with the company and its content over time are now reported and can be used to inform decisions.

“It was huge for our rebranding effort. As we were working on the rebrand and determining which items needed to be refreshed first, we used Coveo’s analytics to prioritize what people are actually downloading and what they’re searching for in order to determine what needed to be updated on Day 1.” Jeff Edgett

These new experience analytics helped to challenge long-standing beliefs about how content was used. In the past, creative teams would prepare multiple assets for print and web. But in looking at the data, it was clear which versions people accessed, and which ones they didn’t and were therefore unnecessary to produce.

Blue Yonder also sometimes faced broken links on landing pages and emails, impacting conversions. In response, the digital team built an internal tool with Coveo, which they affectionately call the asset builder. Living inside the brand site, it provides the Marketing team with the ability to quickly build a landing page in Marketo by retrieving metadata on an asset (such as a title and image) from the Coveo index. No more redundant requests to design or frustrating experiences for visitors to their site.

A consistently great experience

The change that has turned JDA Software into Blue Yonder has truly been transformational and the right time to partner with Coveo.

Every touchpoint makes an impression. Every interaction impacts perception. As the customer journey touches various parts of the organization, Blue Yonder has been rewiring itself with Coveo’s technology becoming part of its central nervous system.

And, it all started with search.

Blue Yonder has successfully compiled what was once a disparate network of systems into one unified index of content that’s used to power search-driven interfaces across digital experience platforms, brand portals, service management, and its CRM.

“In many ways, the implementation of Coveo is not just a functional exercise, it’s also an exercise in brand. As an intelligent supply chain solutions company, we knew we needed to start delivering intelligence at a very fundamental level in our brand experience.”Adam Kite, Director of Digital Marketing

For visitors, the web experience is a much more effective and positive one. Site visits are up 14% and content downloads have increased by more than 26% over the past year alone. The biggest impact? “The calls stopped,” remarks Jeff Edgett, Director of Digital Media. “I went from more than 300 calls in a year to one call complaining about not finding what someone was looking for.”

Inside the organization, Coveo is helping to promote a single brand message across the more than 5,300 employees in 40+ locations around the world. And tools like the asset builder have reduced the one hour of duplicative work that occurs every time a creative team member receives a request for an asset that already exists.

The brand's new tagline Fulfill Your Potential is coming to life. With Coveo, visitors to Blueyonder.com can more easily find the information they need to learn how they can modernize their supply chain and reimagine customer experiences.