Adapting e-commerce & digital operations for an ever-changing world
Your customer’s shopping experiences, environment, technology, and buying patterns are changing. Are your systems and strategies keeping pace? Customers now more than ever want true omnichannel.
E-Commerce & digital operations provides solutions to retailers
Ready to engage us for e-commerce solutions in your organization?
Let's Work Together
NorthStar has expertise in a variety of solutions that can assist your organization in achieving your e-commerce and digital operations roadmap. Businesses large and small, direct to consumer or business to business, are finding it necessary to adapt to a "new normal" and quickly shifting customer buying patterns. The need to execute a truly connected customer omnichannel experience has never been more necessary than now.
Enhancements |
Integration |
Improvements |
Support |
|---|---|---|---|
| Extend current capabilities | Connect current or replacement systems | Create new experiences | Data led feedback & support for future development |
| Evaluate, advise and execute on current systems and process change development, to accelerate improvement of your key performance indicators | Provide integral support structure & partnership to implement strategic sales performance improvements, through system integration | Addition of new capabilities to address customer & employee requirements for an omnichannel experience e.g. pickup and shipping, through partner tools | Ability to engage data science & social media intelligence to provide immediate & constant feedback for ongoing adjustments |
We can guide you through your journey while improving your customer service, conversion, retention, revenue and bottom line.
- Store Systems and E-Commerce Integration
- Mobile First Technology
- Buy Online Pickup In Store (BOPIS)
- Digital Curbside Pick Up
- Store Direct to Consumer Fulfillment
- Enhanced Loyalty Programs
- Omnichannel Pricing and Promotions
- Unified Customer Touch Points
Benefits of omnichannel with NorthStar reach all aspects of your business
Many businesses know that digital is the key to success. However, digital in some cases can cannibalize existing brick and mortar sales because they are not yet complementary.
For your organization to succeed, you must leverage all your sales channels creating the best customer experience, with the best fulfillment, highest sales, and a profitable cart, creating a true omnichannel experience.
The right analysis of your customers’ journey aligned with objective sales data and customer feedback can provide insight into potential areas of improvement to drive optimal results, while allowing your teams to focus on daily operations.
Leading companies choose NorthStar
Results of our work
View All-
- Advisory Services
- Customer Experience Improvement
- E-Commerce & Digital Operations
- Program & Project Management
Leading Non-Profit Healthcare Organization
Transforming a dated and limited website: From vendor evaluation to site launch
Tell me about the client
Our client is a healthcare organization consisting of three hospitals providing a variety of primary and specialty physician services. NorthStar is providing B2B professional services to our client’s Marketing organization to lead and manage their website redesign initiative through various project phases. They were looking to replace their existing websites with a fresh, modern, unified web experience that highlights their unique brand, improves the user experience and delivers measurable results in terms of expanded opportunities to recruit patients, physicians and partners through improved content and online services.
How did NorthStar approach the challenge?
Phase 1: Evaluation
- Captured all of the business drivers from the physician, marketing, and information technology perspectives and ensure alignment amongst all project stakeholders. We knew this would be the key to ensure a clear understanding of the priorities that would guide the discovery and vendor selection process as well as forecast the project initiation timeline for the successful redesign.
- Led the effort in determining the evaluation criteria for vendors, building scoring models, assessing functional requirements, and conducting technical analysis of a variety of content management and provider management platforms.
- Produced a comprehensive analysis of alternatives looking at key metrics to help inform our client of the most technologically sound and affordable options.
Phase 2: Implementation
- Guided the implementation of a fresh, modern, unified website that improved the user experience and delivered measurable results in terms of expanded opportunities to recruit patients, physicians and partners through improved content and online services.
- Led the implementation effort for our client to successfully deploy a consumer-facing provider search and online scheduling toll for both in-person appointments and virtual visits.
- Led the implementation of the provider search and match capability for our client's Access Center, empowering agents with intuitive provider search and match as well as access to provider group data in one centralized system.
Tell me about the goals & milestones that were achieved
Phase 1: Evaluation
- Leveraged NorthStar’s rigorous analysis and chose to proceed with NorthStar’s recommended vendors to execute the website redesign.
- NorthStar guided our client through the procurement process building design documentation and process/data flows in order to enable a smooth transition to project initiation.
- With the help of contracted talent for both content management system and provider management system vendors, we initiated the website redesign project.
Phase 2: Implementation
- Important goal achieved: over 50% of the bookings made on the website are now from new patients.
- Access center provides faster responses to patients seeking care with the use of more centralized provider management system.
- The newly deployed website and provider management platform are key contributors to increased patient acquisition and retention.
- New website design had significant analytics improvements giving visibility to consumer search behavior, care selection, and appointment bookings.
What happens now?
NorthStar continues to lead and manage on-going support for the website as well as vendor coordination, integration management, operational strategic planning, risk mitigation, and change management oversight.
-
- Advisory Services
- E-Commerce & Digital Operations
- Enterprise Information Management
- Execution & Delivery
Worldwide Hospitality Corporation
Identifying issues within website and digital assets to reduce lost revenue and enhance customer experience
NorthStar resolves significant customer problems for our client
A leading hospitality company was experiencing delays and long period gaps before identifying issues and crashes on its website and mobile platform causing loss of revenue and impacting customer experiences. Client sought to implement a solution and program that reduced gaps in identifying issues resulting in increased revenue and improved customer experience.
In collaboration with multiple areas within the Clients Digital Organization and utilizing a series of tools and functionality, a 4 phased program was implemented to combat a series of areas and issues that were identified as key drivers:
- Real Time Dashboard
- Proactive Monitoring KPI Dashboards
- Intelligence Alerts
- Communication Plan
Working together, the program proved to be extremely valuable. Key results:
- Time to identify issues went from 3.5 days to 3 hours
- $17.5M reduction in lost revenue comparing issues pre-launch vs. post-launch
-
- E-Commerce & Digital Operations
- Execution & Delivery
- Insourcing & Outsourcing
- Program & Project Management
Fortune 50 Telecommunications Company
Saving a multi-million investment with a “one CMS, one site” strategy
The request for help
A global media and technology company's Digital Center of Excellence chose NorthStar Solutions Group to develop a content management strategy and save a multi-million-dollar Content Management System (CMS) investment from getting replaced prior to being fully operationalized. In addition to selecting key technology vendors to partner with, NorthStar focused on changing the mindset to a “one CMS, one site” objective operating on key principles of simplicity, operational efficiency, and business process improvement.
The challenge
With the project dangerously close to failure and the technology in jeopardy of getting thrown out, the client turned to the management consultants at NorthStar for help. The NorthStar engagement helped them evolve from having an over-customized, disparate system unable to scale to meet the needs of its enterprise stakeholders, to a stable, scalable and highly efficient platform operating on the vendor’s latest technology.
How NorthStar solved the problem
With NorthStar, our client found a partner with industry leading domain expertise and proven success in implementing and operationalizing content management systems. NorthStar was engaged to augment internal teams and systematically drive improvement in the following ways:
- Develop a continuous upgrade model
- Define taxonomies
- Mature governance and workflow processes
- Automate configuration and code promotion
- Upgrade platform infrastructure
- Create user support and training models
- Define information and system governance processes
On-going project and change support
Since engaging with NorthStar in 2013, the company overcame numerous challenges with their CMS platform. In addition to multiple successful upgrades to the latest CMS version, they implemented a new governance model for both content and systems, and adopted a recommended user support and training program. They also streamlined delivery teams and moved to operating under consolidated code releases on a standard schedule. These changes have resulted in protection of their investment and ability to leverage an enterprise-wide solution across multiple channels for years to come.
-
- Business Transformation
- E-Commerce & Digital Operations
- Organizational Change Management
- Program & Project Management
Top Regional Healthcare System
Mobilizing enterprise-wide project management and organizational change management services
The request
Our client, a top regional healthcare system, had not made any significant technology upgrades in several years and was stale and reaching end-of-life. Under the leadership of a new CEO, they were trying to update everything at once including migrating their end-of-life CMS to Sitecore xDB , migrating their end-of-life web apps from cold fusion to dot net, migrating their end-of-life security platform, and completely redesigning/rebuilding their website. In addition, they wanted to launch concurrent projects to replace their existing web tool with a SaaS solution and building brand new functionality for direct scheduling integration, urgent care wait times, and live chat.
Organizational challenges
Organizational change was a complicating factor because the organization was under new leadership, IT cutbacks, merger with another health system, combining disparate businesses into one website, and industry pressures to do more and more with less. As a result, the organization was overwhelmed and disorganized.
In addition, the existing business and IT had several people leave the organization and the remaining staff was tied down in daily maintenance activities and did not have the time to devote to these projects. They hired consultants to fill the gap, but management was new or inexperienced with projects of this size leading to confusion, gaps, duplicity, and delays.
Our approach
To resolve these challenges, NorthStar consultants first prioritized all projects and goals.
- Coordinated a project plan for the Health System project
- Created the project schedule and got agreement from all the resources and leadership
- Organized a communications program plan to manage and report on all of the projects in progress
- Installed the value of “leadership engagement” to the Health System’s CCO and System Director
- Drove the project forward and created accountability in our status meetings
- Restructured technical and marketing teams to better support the new platform
- Developed training strategy and training modules
The results
NorthStar helped our client to successfully achieve its business objectives and launch the new site on-schedule and with high-quality content as well as demonstrated this successful process and methodology to other project managers to use for future initiatives.
- Coordinated and executed the migration of more than 1,600 content pages and associated imagery to a new Web Content Management System (CMS)
- Provided training and education on the new process for creating and maintaining content after the initial eight-month migration period
- Migrated 1,614 web pages and 245 images while building out a structured library to organize the content
- Created 22 new web forms and applied 450 tags to over 300 web pages
- Conducted valuable training to improve functional capabilities
Our team wants to hear from you
NorthStar Solutions Group is pleased to operate as a virtual company, enabling our team of professionals to help you wherever you are. We are dedicated to supporting your needs and to delivering on your goals.