LEADING BUILDING MATERIALS MANUFACTURER’S NEW SELF-SERVICE SOLUTION

“XTIVIA is a trusted partner that helped translate our ideas into the engaging website we have today. Their expertise and desire to help us succeed is why we continue to entrust them with this challenging but gratifying work.”

Hab Adkins, Corporate Technology Manager 

SUMMARY

For more than eighty-five years, Mueller, Inc. has been dedicated to providing their customers with quality in-house products and services as the leading manufacturer and retailer of steel buildings, metal roofing, and components throughout Texas and the Southwest.

CHALLENGES

“Buying a metal building online is a more complex process,” explains Mueller’s Corporate Technology Manager Hab Adkins—not as simple as purchasing products on a site like Amazon. But their existing open-source content management system didn’t provide the functionality needed to meet these complex and growing needs.

In searching for a new open-source solution, Mueller needed a platform flexible enough to support some of their custom-developed web applications with features that would enable them to transform the customer purchasing experience.

Mueller wanted their new solution to address the following challenges: 

1. The website didn’t provide customers with a personalized showcase of products. Far from the dynamic experience Mueller wanted for their customers, the website was a static digital clone of the printed product catalog and failed to generate warm leads.
2. Customers weren’t effectively engaged online. Since the website was little more than a catalog, Mueller wasn’t able to capture where customers were at in their journey or assist them as they moved through the sales cycle other than by email.
3. The sales process was lengthy and largely not digitized. When customers were ready to make a purchase, they usually had to visit a local sales branch in order to get what they needed, which was unsustainable for the future. 

Liferay’s out-of-the-box features and development toolset empower us to create a customer experience that moves us toward the vision of engaging customers wherever they are and completing the whole purchase process online.

Hab Adkins, Corporate Technology Manager

IMPLEMENTATION

Mueller chose Liferay for their new solution and began a two-phase execution process with XTIVIA, a trusted Liferay Partner from the Liferay Partner Network. 

In the first phase, Mueller relied on XTIVIA to build out a minimum viable product in under a year, strategically integrating certain custom web applications into Liferay through Liferay SAML and migrating others directly into Liferay. Using Liferay also meant Mueller was able to consolidate development tools and technologies into a standard toolset on one platform. 

For the second phase, Mueller transitioned some responsibilities internally, leveraging Liferay University and XTIVIA resources to acquire the right skills and product knowledge. 

Here are just a few highlights of the new and improved website: 

• Shareable checklists where customers and prospects can save their favorite products and submit their lists to the sales team
• Complex workflow routing with Liferay Forms that send customer responses to the appropriate group within Mueller
• Facebook integration, where custom Liferay campaign pages can be created and maintained without IT involvement, with the ability to track statistics and evaluate campaign success
• A 3D design tool that customers can use to bring their building vision to life and get a quote 

RESULTS

Giving new life to their website and adding more self-service capabilities with the help of XTIVIA has already surfaced incredible benefits for Mueller. Corporate Technology Manager Hab Adkins explains, “We regularly hear from customers who share positive feedback about the site and how it helped them refine their ideas into an eventual purchase.”

By allowing customers to explore product offerings, find project ideas, and learn more about the process, customers can become better informed faster, removing roadblocks to making a significant purchase. Mueller has seen a 73% increase in quotes per month, with some months as high as 163%. 

Mueller has experienced the following additional benefits post-implementation: 

1. Traffic on the website has jumped 250%. With the new added features and functionality, Mueller has seen their site visitors increase from around 400,000 per month to 1.4 million.

2. The overall sales process is shorter and less burdensome. New self-service and consolidation/integration of technologies has freed up the sales team and increased their efficiency.

3. Customer engagement is easy to track. With the new website, Mueller can track customer engagement using several metrics, including user accounts, checklists that have been created and submitted, digital catalog requests, and more. 

For the future, Mueller has set their sights on continuing to improve their solution, building an experience that allows customers to complete even more of the sales process online than is currently possible with existing complex purchases. Improving this experience enables Mueller to fulfill their goal of providing high-quality materials to their customers from the comfort of their own homes.

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