Build a digital presence to promote the CEAT brand to customers around the world
Create an e-commerce platform to promote direct sales with customers
Adapt quickly to meet fast-changing consumer market needs
Reach customers in markets around the world in their native languages
Results
Built D2C platform from the ground up with SAP and Salesforce integrations in 3 months
Creates campaign pages in less than a week
Reduced bounce rates from 60% to 35% and nearly doubled click-through rates
Streamlines launch of international websites for different markets and languages
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While online shopping is becoming the norm in many industries, most consumers still buy their tyres in person. That trend holds true for CEAT Tyres, a leading Indian multinational tyre brand. CEAT manufactures tyres for many types of vehicles—including cars, bicycles, and commercial trucks – and provides them to customers in more than 100 countries, either directly or through OEM partners.
For Vidur Anand, digital sales and customer experience lead at CEAT Tyres, digital channels play a vital role in helping the company fulfill its goals of providing world-class products and services to customers. “There is a small but growing number of customers who want to purchase tyres online, but just as importantly, a huge number of customers do research online,” says Anand. “Having a strong digital presence is the best way for CEAT to connect with customers about the brand and get them interested in purchasing a CEAT tyre, either online, at a CEAT store, or through a dealer or partner store.”
CEAT Tyres was in the process of building a website with a partner when the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the shift in consumers’ online behaviors. Anand saw that the company’s existing website plans didn’t fully cover how quickly customer needs were evolving, so he decided to take another look at web platforms. This time, however, he focused on finding a solution that provided the power and flexibility needed to support changing digital requirements over the next several years, including e-commerce capabilities and regional websites.
With support from partner Tekno Point, CEAT stood up a new website in just a few months with Adobe Experience Manager Sites and Experience Manager Assets in Adobe Experience Cloud. The site soon expanded with e-commerce capabilities from Adobe Commerce, also part of Experience Cloud, turning the website into a powerful customer touchpoint where customers can research, purchase, and plan the delivery of tyres.
“While we looked at many different solutions, Adobe Experience Cloud was quickly added to the shortlist,” says Anand. “It’s made to be user-friendly and agile, which would help us get the website running quickly and keep it updated faster. With the integration between Experience Manager and Commerce, we could also take advantage of the synergies to add new capabilities as we grow our digital experience.”
“The Tekno Point team advised us on potential opportunities for how we could develop the website and engage customers. It also worked with us on best practices for all of our day-to-day activities.”
Vidur Anand
Digital Sales and Customer Experience Lead, CEAT Tyres
Building a high-performing website in less than three months
Adobe Solutions Partner Tekno Point worked closely with CEAT to support its digital transformation. During the discovery phase, Tekno Point did extensive research to understand the company’s broad tyre catalog, explore customer needs, and make a plan for establishing e-commerce, including planning how internal processes such as billing and delivery should be handled.
“Tekno Point stood out as a skilled vendor with the experience to handle all of our website and e-commerce goals,” says Anand. “The Tekno Point team advised us on potential opportunities for how we could develop the website and engage customers and worked with us on best practices for all of our day-to-day activities.”
To accelerate the digital transformation, CEAT and Tekno Point agreed to a two-phased approach. First, Tekno Point built an informational, mobile-first website using Experience Manager Sites. Second, Tekno Point focused on bringing the e-commerce capabilities live with Commerce, including dealer integration with Salesforce.
“CEAT is a major sponsor of the IPL – India’s professional cricket league – and it wanted the first phase website online quickly to take advantage of the additional name recognition and potential web traffic during the IPL season,” says Yash Mody, CTO at Tekno Point. “In just 2.5 months, we built the CEAT website from the ground up. We couldn’t have achieved such fast time-to-market without Adobe Experience Manager.”
“With Adobe Experience Manager Sites, we can plan and create new campaign pages within a week. The templates allow us to work much more cost-effectively and efficiently, leading to significantly faster time-to-market.”
Vidur Anand
Digital Sales and Customer Experience Lead, CEAT Tyres
Optimizing the website experience
CEAT chose a headless implementation, which enables customer-facing channels to reliably connect to APIs on the backend to efficiently deliver the exact experiences customers need, regardless of how and where they access services. The Tekno Point team first brought the product catalog out of the company’s SAP ERP system and into Commerce using APIs. They then wrote a GraphQL layer to pull the data from Commerce into Experience Manager in a headless manner, creating an experience layer in Experience Manager to help customers search for products.
One of the biggest benefits of working with Experience Manager Sites is the speed of creating or updating content. Content such as copy, images, tables, or menus can be reused across pages. CEAT analyzes customer experiences with Adobe Analytics and uses these insights to optimize the website for a growing number of customers. Authors can make changes rapidly, propagating changes made to one content fragment across all pages. Templates take advantage of mobile-first design techniques for sites that display beautifully on any screen size.
CEAT frequently releases new campaigns and celebrity endorsements to announce new models of tyres or highlight existing tyre lines. “With Adobe Experience Manager Sites, we can plan and create new campaign page within a week,” says Anand. “The templates allow us to work much more cost-effectively and efficiently, leading to significantly faster time-to-market.”
All web content is stored in Experience Manager Assets, creating a central hub for authors to find content when needed. The Dynamic Media functionality in Experience Manager Assets takes advantage of artificial intelligence to transform media for all screens. For instance, Dynamic Media automatically creates multiple renditions of each image file to create images that are the right size for every screen. It also optimizes the file size, maximizing loading speeds for all website customers.
“The frequent updates and optimized web experiences have helped us improve SEO rankings and grow website traffic dramatically,” says Anand. “We reduced bounce rates from 60% to 35% while increasing click-through rates from 5% to 9.5%. As we continue to optimize the website experience and add more functionality with Adobe Experience Manager, we expect to see those numbers rise even further.”
“CEAT is now far ahead of the competition. The agility and strong functionality of Adobe Experience Cloud solutions played a big role in the project’s success.”
Yash Mody
CTO, Tekno Point
Reaching customers worldwide
To further expand its digital reach, CEAT launched its first international website in 2022. The multi-site manager feature and multilingual capabilities will make it easier for CEAT to continue to create and manage variations of the website for different regions and languages. Eventually CEAT hopes to expand to around a dozen countries and 20 languages to reach all of its major markets.
“In just one year, CEAT has made incredible progress with its digital transformation,” says Mody. “CEAT is now far ahead of the competition. The agility and strong functionality of Adobe Experience Cloud solutions played a big role in the project’s success.”
