Sears Financial is the division of Sears Canada that manages Sears’ Financial Services, Home Services and Specialty Services. Sears wanted to rebuild the Financial Services website on a new Content Management System (CMS) to make it easy for non-technical staff to update content on the site.

T4G, a six-year winner of the Sears Partners in Progress Awards for supplier excellence, collaborated with Sears Financial and other suppliers to implement this new customer-facing website and unified platform.

Situation

The website presents products and services to customers and is the primary customer communications channel for Sears Financial. The website also allows customers to administer their own accounts using a secure sign on feature. In 2011, Sears decided to update the website for several reasons:

• Administration of the site was cumbersome and updating the site was inefficient. Each time updates were required, non-technical content authors required assistance from IT staff with computer skills ranging from HTML to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). This created a bottleneck in presenting content updates to customers on the site.

• The workflow processes for content development, publishing and approval weren’t optimal.

• Business intelligence, performance data and other metrics were not consistently captured/analyzed.

• The site lacked efficient marketing opportunities, such as linking Sears Financial promotions to other Sears websites.

• There was no single sign-on or unified account solution to make it easier for Sears customers who interacted with multiple Sears sites.

Solution

T4G built the new Sears Financial website on the Sitecore platform (an industry-leading CMS Content Management Solution) and Microsoft’s SQL Server 2008.

Sears Financial is now well-positioned to move the balance of their websites to the Sitecore platform to ensure that all of their businesses benefit from this flexibility and ease of use.