Dudley asked “how might we improve our digital strategy?”
Specialising in a range of savings accounts and intermediary delivered mortgages, including specialist mortgages for ex-pats, self-builders and self-employed home buyers, Dudley Building Society had found their niche, honed their expertise created an amazing product range and updated their brand. All that was left to do, was to give their digital presence an upgrade to match, the question was, what was the best way to do this?
We answered...
“by exploring the challenges, refining the options and thinking strategically” and this kick started the first phase, of what would become a two-phase project.
Objective
Dudley Building Society already knew their digital performance wasn’t measuring up to their own standards, or their competitors. What they didn’t know was how to improve it, so the first and perhaps the most important objective for this project, was to devise a digital strategy that solved this problem.
That meant considering improvements across their user experience and user interfaces. Successfully rolling their new brand out across their digital collateral without alienating their existing audiences. Consolidating their digital footprint in an easier to manage and maintain enterprise-level CMS and last but by no means least, raising interest in who they are and what they do, to grow their customer base even further.
What we did
Initially, we partnered with Dudley Building Society as their digital consultants. We worked alongside their core delivery team to immerse ourselves in what they needed, what was challenging them and what they hoped to achieve. We facilitated three half day sessions with the key teams within the organisation: savings, mortgages, compliance and the senior leadership including their CEO.
Then, time was spent to consolidate these findings and elaborate on them through competitor analysis, user experience reviews and digital performance audits. The result was a thoughtful and extensive 75 page report offering recommendations to improve their digital roadmap, the structure of their digital footprint, the functionality of their user experience and to bring it all to life, an initial concept for a new website homepage.
After delivering this to the team and board at Dudley Building Society, we waited in excited anticipation for feedback on what they wanted to do next.
A new website, on a new CMS, with a new brand
We’re delighted to say, that in the end, we were chosen to work with Dudley Building Society on making many of those initial recommendations a reality. The project now entered its second phase: bringing their new brand to life online, restructuring their multiple websites into one easy to navigate website and improving their brand awareness and brand equity across new and existing users.
Built on the Kentico CMS, using their block-based builder, integrated with key third party platforms including Smart Money People and enhanced with key features such as savings calculators and a product finder: the new Dudley Building Society website is now easier for internal teams to update and improve and more engaging and interactive for their customers.
Reimagining experiences for intermediaries
Intermediaries benefited from a dedicated section of the website, taking content previously obfuscated in downloadable documents onto digestible content first landing pages. The intermediary onboarding process was reimagined as a digital experience, improving onboarding efficiency and data accuracy.
Meeting FCA requirements with dynamic data
Although the product finder, from a UX point of view is simple and successful, the data set driving it is nothing short of complicated, for all the right reasons. As an FCA regulated business, Dudley Building Society need to make sure the right products, are mapped to the right accounts, with expired products seamlessly transferred to historic product tables. To do this, we designed “shell” pages, that dynamically pull the relevant data from the set, while still ensuring URL structures and navigation elements are consistent.
Empowering growth with AWS
Finally, we worked closely with Dudley’s internal IT team to architect a whole new hosting environment using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to ensure that this investment in a better digital footprint, was securely supported by IT infrastructure that could grow as their digital performance continued to grow.
Was it all worth it?
overall decrease in bounce rate on mobile devices.
increase in pages viewed per session on mobile devices.
increase in organic traffic, achieving over 10,000 organic visits on average per month.
increase in landing pages that weren’t the home page.
