SQLI is Ibexa's Partner of the Month for July

The French digital agency SQLI is one of the largest in Europe. With a turnover of €214 million in 2020, its 2,100 employees are located in 13 countries: France, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium, The United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, The Netherlands, Denmark, Spain, Morocco, Mauritius and Dubai. 
 

50+ Joint Projects between Ibexa and SQLI

The reach and ambition of its projects make it an ideal collaborator with Ibexa, and our partnership goes back more than 15 years, with more than 50 joint projects under our belt.

For Olympio Yannick, the Paris-based Manager Web & Mobile Solutions, the strength of Ibexa is that the platform has continuously reinvented itself to respond to changing market conditions. An important synergy with SQLI’s client base is the extensibility of Ibexa DXP. “We want to leverage Ibexa’s unique market position as offering a Digital Experience Platform and e-commerce solution on one single platform, minimizing maintenance costs, and ensuring better synergy between content, commerce and personalization,” he says. 

The demand for such an end-to-end customer experience is becoming more visible, according to Yannick.

“Clients start with projects that revolve around content,” he says, “that’s a given. But a trend we are seeing is that they want to keep a door open to e-commerce. The extensibility of Ibexa DXP is definitely a factor for them. They want a best-of-breed DXP of course – and are attracted and reassured by the fact that Ibexa offers the possibility to add e-commerce functionalities natively.”

SQLI has 15  Ibexa-certified developers, and the agency is an early adopter of the new commercial certification, with four employees qualifying so far.

One reference project is the careers site of Crédit Agricole, which spans 52 countries and provides applicants with a customised view depending on his or her profile. SQLI developed the site in just three months using Ibexa technology.

The agency’s most recent collaboration with Ibexa DXP was to build an intranet site for a French pharmaceutical group that employs 22,500 worldwide . 

Perhaps the most extensive and ambitious SQLI/Ibexa build was for Carrefour Assurance, for the insurance arm of the French hypermarket group, which did not exist as an independent brand before the dedicated site was launched on Ibexa DXP. 

“We recommended Ibexa DXP for its ability to breathe life into a brand through its robust yet flexible content management environment,” says Yannick. “But scalability was also important as the site had to be developed progressively, and we started with nothing.”

The first phase of the project was to design the UI and customer trajectory of subscribing to white-label products for two types of cover: car and home insurance. “This worked well, and the client decided right away to go ahead and do a showcase site for the Carrefour Assurance commercial brand to sell in their own name.

“This is what we did. A few months later the site went live with rich and complex customer pathways for the sale of Carrefour Assurance products – all designed and executed on Ibexa.”

The project is ongoing. To Yannick, it is a great example of the fluidity of sales channels. “The site has B2B functionalities which leverage the partnership with PEEP, an influential French parent-teacher association,” he explains. “But it also connects with brick-and-mortar Carrefour shops. You can buy a prepaid card for the so-called ‘assurance scolaire’ [insurance for school activities, compulsory in certain circumstances] from a Carrefour supermarket, and then activate the card on the website in what you might call a hybrid B2C2B experience.”

Yannick is keen two highlight two other aspects of Ibexa DXP. “It helps with recruitment, it really does,” he says. “As you know it’s very difficult to find talented and highly motivated developers – or to retain them. Developers like challenges; they like to sink their teeth into the type of complex projects that are possible on Ibexa DXP but perhaps not on a lot of other solutions.”

SQLI itself uses Ibexa DXP to support large digital display systems in all its offices. “In our Paris office in Levallois-Perret, we have screens on every floor, and we use Ibexa to push content to all these screens.”

This is more than a gimmick. The SQLI screens display local news, company announcements, weather forecasts “all personalized in Ibexa to make sure that every agency has the right and appropriate information, both in term of local context and language”.

And so SQLI deploys Ibexa for its clients – but also internally. There could be no greater sign of trust and confidence.

Joint marketing efforts are a big part of the Ibexa partner ecosystem. On July 6, SQLI and Ibexa are co-hosting a webinar  in Spanish on the future of B2B transformation. To participate please register here