How DLL is reshaping partnerships for growth beyond B2B

At Sitecore Symposium 2024, global finance leader DLL Group’s Global Head of Digital Products Wagner Santos, delivered a compelling breakout session, detailing the company’s journey of transforming business processes and evolving customer engagement strategy from B2B to B2B2C. Santos was joined by Anderson Cardozo, Principal Engineer at VML, DLL’s Sitecore partner in Brazil.

To set the scene, the session began with DLL mapping out their path to progress with Sitecore.

• 2017-2018: DLL selected Sitecore as the company’s global CMS solution and began laying a new digital foundation to support a reimagined technical architecture and solution architecture. During this period, DLL in Brazil also began a critical partnership with Sitecore Global Platinum Partner VML. This dynamic relationship has steadily grown over the years and continues to deepen and flourish today.
• 2019-2021: DLL launched several new digital channels and portals. During this period, the company also integrated 11 APIs into its ecosystem, and added analytics, personalization, and a new design system.
• 2022-2024: DLL focused on creating new digital experiences, evolving its data strategy, upgrading its Sitecore deployment, and improving customer value. The company also completed two major updates to its acclaimed Financing Simulator tool and introduced a quick calculator.

To continue growing, adapting, evolving, and leading the way in the rapidly changing vendor finance industry, DLL identified four key challenges to address and overcome:

• The importance of making data-driven decisions and leveraging reliable and up-to-date business intelligence to drive customer personalization.
• Using proactive strategies to manage increasingly regulatory pressures. A PwC survey found that 52% of businesses say an increase in financial service regulations is a top scenario in their 2-year resilience plans.
• Increasing customer engagement through a more intuitive website interface and apps.
• Outpacing competition as new players and new solutions enter the marketplace.

To refine its approach and strategy for addressing and overcoming these challenges, DLL identified three key target audiences (personas) that had to be embraced, empowered, and energized by the company’s digital experience:

• Partners: Quickly close deals, manage pipeline, and provide value to clients using DLL’s services.
• DLL Sales Team: Provide personalized experience to partners and clients and enable partners to get the best deals with DLL and clients.
• Customers: Access invoices and contract information and quickly check financing status.

To better serve these key target audiences, DLL created two portals:

• The Partner Portal provides DLL partners with real-time updates and seamless document management, and has significantly improved speed, efficiency, and customer service. Currently, the Partner Portal serves 3,000 partners.
• The Partner Portal also supports the DLL sales team, which is using it to deliver targeted communication and facilitate direct engagement — which relate directly the company’s goal of boosting customer personalization in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
• The Client Portal empowers customers with real-time updates and allows them to schedule payments and access invoices.

The Client Portal has substantially improved customer experience, especially regarding speed and efficiency. However, the issue that DLL faced was that the two portals were disconnected. There was no bridge that allowed customers to move closer to DLL’s partners and sales team. The gap was also creating an excessive amount of paperwork for partners and members of the sales team. This scenario called for a new vision and a new experience.

To address the Client Portal-Partner Portal gap, DLL re-imagined its architecture — powered by its Sitecore engine — by deploying an ecosystem of microservices and introducing a customer app.

DLL’s innovative approach in this area was defined and driven by three key goals:

• Increase ease of doing business by incorporating fintech innovations for more agile operations.
• Dramatically reduce the amount of paper in the process — 95% of all business should be digital and touchless.
• Enable and unleash the benefits of B2B2C by fully integrating customers in the overall process.

DLL’s story resonated strongly with the theme of Symposium 2024, which celebrated what can be achieved when imagining what is possible meets the power to build. Below is a snapshot of the improvements and results that the company has realized to date:

• More streamlined operations due to workflow automation and digitizing documents.
• Accelerated and optimized decision-making through the implementation of an auto-decisioning risk model that uses AI.
• Delivering a more seamless and intuitive customer experience by enhancing the Customer Portal. Automated reminders and status updates keep customers informed and engaged. In addition, customers can perform all tasks at once without having to maintain close contact with partners.
• Supporting the sales team by automating lead generation and sales origination. Personalized email sequences now guide potential customers through the financing process.
• Increasing competitive advantage and innovation by introducing new digital solutions, including responsive applications and third-party solutions integrated via APIs.

In addition, the partnership between DLL and Sitecore partner VML continues to have a positive impact on operational efficiency and business growth, including:

By combining customer focus with deep industry knowledge, DLL is delivering sustainable solutions for the vendor finance industry.

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