Portals and Collaboration Success Story

Shaw Communications

Shaw Communications Inc. is a diversified Canadian telecommunications company whose core business is providing broadband cable television, Internet, digital phone and satellite direct-to-home (DTH) services to approximately 3.0 million customers. Over the years, Shaw has greatly expanded its network and its leading edge product and service offerings, and is now the leading residential broadband service provider in Western Canada. Shaw is traded on both the Toronto and New York stock exchange.

Challenge

The shaw.ca site was built approximately five years ago by an external vendor, employing heavy use of macromedia flash throughout the design. Although ‘flashy’ to look at, the site did not take a customer-centric approach to its design. The site simply didn’t drive customer acquisitions; overall site traffic was low and customer feedback negative regarding online user experience.

Additionally, content management and operational maintenance of the site was time and resource intensive. This resulted in cumbersome and restrictive internal updating processes for Shaw. Specifically, content from continuous HR Career postings and Pay per View listings to simple price and product information changes, had to be requested through the Shaw IT department. The business felt they were not empowered as the real subject matter experts, to update or publish content to customers, and they were concerned that deploying and updating the web sites costs too much and took too long. Further, Shaw IT staff recognized that they spent too much time on lowvalue tasks such as updating web content instead of driving web-based projects that result in cost savings, increased customer satisfaction and competitive advantage in the market.

Solution

Shaw engaged Ideaca to implement a Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 (MCMS) solution. Powered by Microsoft .NET–connected technology, MCMS enables companies to quickly and efficiently build, deploy and maintain mission critical content-rich web sites. By streamlining the web publishing process, Content Management Server reduces the need for costly site maintenance, empowering business users to manage their own content. The successfully deployed shaw.ca on the MCMS platform allowed non-IT staff to update site content in a timely fashion. The project also delivered a web standards guide and a development framework which can be leveraged on other future Shaw CMS projects.

Benefits

Shaw Communications Inc is realizing a wealth of benefits from its solution. These include:

  • Improved online customer experience - site visitors experience a contemporary user interface with an intuitive, hierarchal navigation, fast; efficient page downloads and content specific to their location.
  • More efficient use of resources - subject matter experts were empowered to update and publish content to customers without IT assistance, decreasing the overall costs of the sites maintenance.