Atlantic Pro

New site: a milestone in digital transformation

Groupe Atlantic is a world leader in the manufacture of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning products, with an annual turnover of more than €2 billion. Since 2015, it has deployed Ibexa technology to create digital experiences across many of its brands and markets. 

One of its divisions, Atlantic France, relaunched its B2B Atlantic PROS website in May: a two-year project that involved 40 people and eight different teams internally. The implementation marks a milestone in the digital transformation of Atlantic France, both technically and in its relationship with its customers. 
Nhu Vu Ngoc, Head of Digital B2B for Atlantic France, was brought in two years ago to lead the project. Atlantic’s technology partner was the French digital agency Almavia CX. 

The scale of the task facing Ngoc and her team was immense.

Prior to the project, Atlantic France ran different sites for each type of product, as well as a reference portal and a training site for a total footprint of 10 websites. .

A unified and coherent user experience

The first objective of the new website was to bring the content of all the old B2B sites together on Ibexa DXP, giving B2B visitors a unified and coherent experience of all Atlantic-branded products. This is game-changing because distributors, architects, installation engineers and other Atlantic B2B customers regularly interact with more than one of its products. 

Before the launch of the new site, a certified installer of Atlantic boilers, radiators, and underfloor heating had to navigate between multiple sites to view these products and to download product specifications and installation manuals. For a distributor or Atlantic re-seller stocking the entire range of products, the experience would be even more fragmented.

The project of experience transformation replaced the different product sites with just one site for all Atlantic products, creating one account log-in and one UI for all digital encounters with the brand. “That is why we carried out this re-design,” says Ngoc, “to speak with one voice to our professional customers.”

Although the brand experience and site ergonomics are consistent across all products, content is personalized for each group or “typology” of B2B customer. “This starts immediately with the navigation,” explains Ngoc. “If I log on as an installation engineer, all the carousel sliders that I see are ones that I would be interested in as an installer of Atlantic products.”

“Then if I go on to the product page of a heat pump, the site will talk to me about ease of installation. But if I am a civil engineer or a property developer, the product page for that heat pump will tell me about its energy efficiency.”

The new Atlantic PROS site segments for several B2B personas: distributors, re-sellers, architects, product installers, surveyors and civil engineers, the large construction sector, and developers of domestic buildings.

Personalizing the customer experience

“We do not express ourselves in the same way to these different groups. We don’t push the same content on them,” says Ngoc. “We really focus on what interests them, which means we really tailor our customer conversation.”

Personalized content is not accessible to other typologies. “Seventy percent of our content is restricted,” Ngoc adds. “We want to incentivise our customers to open an account with us.”

This introduces another level of complexity .

“We have three levels of visibility,” explains Ngoc. “At the first level, our content is open and accessible; at the second level, it is visible to everyone yet not accessible to everyone. A common example of this is a PDF with product specifications: you can see it’s there but to open it or to email it to a client, you have to log in to your account. So the third level of visibility is content targeted to specific typologies, and available to you when you log in as that customer type.”

It is too soon to have an overview of which functionalities and types of product downloads are most popular for each category of B2B customer, but Ngoc and her team are monitoring this to prepare for future development. 

The reaction from customers in the testing phase was overwhelmingly positive, Ngoc says. For example, an energy consultancy writes: “Compared with the previous sites, it’s day and night. The navigation is very fluid, and we save a lot of time.”

The technology collaborator in this complex digital journey was Ibexa Partner Almavia CX. One of the reasons that Almavia recommended Ibexa for this project was the ease with which it connects to third-party systems.

“We also have a PIM and a product dashboard that is interfaced with the site. There are scheduled tasks that run every night to retrieve updates to this dashboard,” says Maxime Devaux, project manager at Almavia CX. “There is also a document database that interfaces with the site. We have a search engine, which is Swiftype, a SaaS solution. It’s an external website that indexes the contents of the site quite regularly. Then, when we do a search, we interrogate this external system.“It’s the external links, and the fluidity of these links, that give the Atlantic PROS site its richness,” Devaux continues. 

E-commerce is scheduled for 2022

Future plans include yet more personalization, especially for installation experts where Atlantic operates two business models with discrete contractual arrangements. A major project scheduled to kick off in 2022 is e-commerce. “This will include training,” says Ngoc, “where we’ll be able to simply make a reservation online or notify an installation engineer that his or her certification is about to expire. That will be another big step forward for us.”

Another big step in a journey of transformation that is bringing Atlantic ever closer to its customers by giving them a rich, frictionless experience.