Taylor Wimpey

About Taylor Wimpey.

Taylor Wimpey is one of the UK’s largest residential housing developers and a FTSE 250 company, constructing over 15,000 new homes annually. Their core service is building new homes for a broad audience, including first-time buyers and seasoned homeowners. They partnered with us from 2011 to enhance their digital presence and customer experience.

The Challenge.

Taylor Wimpey approached us with the need to revamp their digital presence. Their primary interest was in the design and build of a new website. The existing digital landscape presented several challenges: poor user engagement, lack of engaging content, and significant 'findability' issues due to inadequate SEO configuration. They aimed to improve user journeys, making them seamless and stress-free, thus enhancing overall customer satisfaction and engagement.

Our Solution.

Our collaboration with Taylor Wimpey began with a comprehensive discovery phase, uncovering insights into the rational and emotional aspects of house buying. This involved a full schedule of interviews, workshops and research with internal & external stakeholders, which resulted in a blueprint for the new digital estate that addressed Taylor Wimpey’s challenges.

From these insights, we created an engagement strategy, with content strategy as a core element, and subsequent content design which fed into organisational wide taxonomy and site experience design.

A hi-fi, fully navigable prototype of the platform allowed us to live test with end users and refine using an alpha approach, perfecting pre-launch elements including usability, design, content presentation, accessibility, multi device compatibility and optimisation for search engines (SEO).

We then developed a fresh, responsive website built on Sitecore with a refined design for optimised user journeys. The result was a user-controlled front end, capable of providing consistent user experiences across multiple devices and clear user journeys.

The new site featured localization functionality, targeting individual user areas and regions, and a bespoke API to connect Taylor Wimpey’s COINS ERP, enabling a multi-directional data feed.

As part of our ongoing partnership, in 2016 we introduced an innovative Customer Portal designed to streamline the home-buying process. This bespoke portal, piloted in two regions, allowed customers to manage the selection and purchase of their homes, providing a more personalized and efficient experience.

Key Considerations.

• Security: The pilot Customer Portal handles a large amount of personal data, from financial details to personal addresses. Security was a top priority and the use of SSL protected data and TDE encryption ensured no vulnerabilities.
• Managed Services: The size of Taylor Wimpey’s audience meant a 24/7/365 support service was needed. Our dedicated Managed Services team ensure stability & security, as well as reactivity to incidents on all days of the year.
• Customised Integrations: We ensured the integration with major property platforms like Rightmove and Zoopla to enhance the data quality and breadth on the website.

The Result.

The new digital presence engages with the users at every stage of the home buying process from seeking planning permission, offering support through the buying cycle and post purchase. With a newly established singular customer view, the new website delivered substantial improvements:

• A 14% increase in overall traffic, indicating higher engagement and interest.
• A 66% rise in call centre enquiries, reflecting improved user journeys and easier access to information.
• Positive feedback from the Customer Portal pilot, with 80% of new customers in the trial regions utilizing the portal to manage their home-buying process.

A continuous improvement cycle ensures that the site continues to cater to user and business need and makes great use of data from site metrics, customer feedback, A/B & multivariate testing.

The pilot’s success has paved the way for a broader rollout, further enhancing Taylor Wimpey’s digital service offerings and customer experience.

Finally, central control of content and the ability to customise content for users has improved massively, with average user session showing more time spent on relevant pages. With the new provision of data collection & integration, continuous improvement of community engagement can be achieved.