How Westfield Insurance migrated to XM Cloud
Leading insurance company Westfield Insurance makes its claim to the cloud.
5 minute read
When a three-year contract for Sitecore XP came up for renewal at Westfield Insurance, timing was everything. With a 175-year history, Westfield is a leading provider of personal, commercial, and specialty insurance with international presence. An urgent business requirement for a new corporate website coincided with the opportunity to rethink Westfield’s technology architecture, resulting in a content strategy transformation.
“We wanted to redesign westfieldinsurance.com to be more customer-centric, so it would strengthen relationships with customers and prospects in multiple stages of their journeys and ensure a relevant brand presence in the marketplace,” said Christian Coughlan, Principal Enterprise Architect for Westfield, in front of a live audience at Sitecore Symposium 2024. He was joined by two speakers from Sitecore Platinum Partner Americaneagle.com: Director of Sitecore Operations Maggie Burke and Sitecore Architect Tim Shanahan.
Burke attributed the successful transformation to a business-first approach that put design needs ahead of tech decisions. “We didn’t let tech lead the business requirements,” she said. “We let the business drive the tech decisions. We always came back to the CTAs and measurable outcomes.”
Embarking on a journey with Sitecore
The breakout presentation began with a flashback to Westfield’s initial journey with Sitecore and the purchase of XP in 2020 for an on-premises deployment. This was a “lift-and-shift” of westfieldinsurance.com, Coughlan explained, and a replacement of the existing agent portal. Over time, Westfield found XP to be feature-rich but technically complex.
In considering a move to the more flexible SaaS model, Coughlan saw two main opportunities:
- Improve developer workflow and enable faster delivery cycles.
- Improve page-load performance, ADA compliance, and SEO.
He also knew that Westfield would have emerging business requirements for multilingual support and regional deployment, due to a recent acquisition. Westfield approached Americaneagle.com for a proposal to handle the design and content strategy for a complete refresh of its flagship site.
Together, Westfield and Americaneagle.com landed on a set of objectives to evolve Westfield’s corporate website from Westfield-centric to persona-centric to improve and personalize the visitor experience. The objectives included:
- Customer-centric content: Develop relevant content that answers questions, addresses pain points, needs, and preferences.
- Engage and retain: Increase engagement and interactivity.
- Enhance personalization: Deepen engagement and conversion through personalized experiences.
- Accessibility and compliance: Ensure WCAG AA 2.1 compliance.
- Mobile experience: Boost mobile responsiveness regardless of device.
- Increase conversions: Increased conversions to click and connect customers with an agent near them and start the quote process.
- Data-driven marketing decisions: Utilize Google Analytics 4, Search Console, and SEMrush to guide strategies.
Westfield’s redesign journey began with several workshops with Westfield Insurance leadership to review overall business objectives and goals. Next, the team conducted a competitive analysis to compare strengths and identify opportunities for improvement.
Finally, the team moved on to personas and audience types to enable funneled journeys on the new website.
Phased approach
A phased approach began with a foundational strategy and user behavior analysis in Phase 1, followed by XM Cloud development, design/content development, and SEO improvements in Phase 2. Looking ahead to Phase 3, the team plans to make further content enhancements and implement A/B testing capabilities along with personalization.
The decision to move to XM Cloud
Several factors led to Westfield’s decision to move to XM Cloud. There was the timing of the XP contract ending, the emerging international needs, new mobile experience requirements, and on the technical side, a desire to try a headless architecture for more flexibility. “We wanted to avoid technical debt while moving to a simplified tech stack, so we could eliminate time and effort spent on platform upgrades,” Coughlan said. The new composable architecture allowed for more choice and capabilities, plus improved interoperability with existing solutions.
As an added benefit, Americaneagle.com works closely with Sitecore, and Westfield was able to get real-time feedback and implementation of changes throughout the migration. “We rolled the components out quickly and then focused on the Pages Editor,” Shanahan said. “Not only is the end site responsive and fast, but also the content authoring experience is something that Westfield’s content owners will enjoy doing.” In this way, Westfield’s new site helps the editing team that’s putting in the work, day after day.
Choices around search and personalization are being made with an eye toward future business needs. Westfield anticipates wanting to add Sitecore CDP, and the company is making plans to migrate its agency portal to the new architecture.
In closing, Coughlan let the audience in on a behind-the-scenes decision: “I was so confident in the website refresh that I’ve brought the whole development team to Symposium the week before we’re going live.”
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