Kubota Tractor Corporation Enhanced Its Customer Journey, Ensured No Website Downtime and Increased New Website Users by 23% with Progress Sitefinity Cloud

For the last four years, Kubota Tractor Corporation has been offering products in a wide variety of segments including lawn mowers, utility vehicles, construction equipment, agriculture tractors and hay equipment. The Kubota Tractor Companies’ website infrastructure and hosting were being done in-house, which meant that releases and code changes would cause website downtime and would have to be scheduled during off hours, which was very cumbersome.



After a long stretch without updates to the user experience journey, Kubota sought to provide engaging and informative website content to increase user engagement and conversions.

It evaluated solutions that would empower the development team offload infrastructure management and work on complex, mission- critical projects, while putting the entire brand experience in the hands of the marketers.

 

Kubota turned to Progress® Sitefinity® Cloud and implementation partner, Team SI to help standardize its brand experience and infrastructure management across the country in 354 Kubota Dealer sites.

As Alex Hood, Team SI, commented, “Sitefinity Cloud was chosen because of the performance, availability, and the integrated Azure DevOps management portal. The ease of creating custom content-types, widgets, and more in Sitefinity allowed us to create engaging UI/UX and further enhance the customer journey efficiently and with zero downtime, all while providing solid data for Kubota’s API to utilize for its TracTru dealer sites. The data gleaned helps us determine the right mix of content and which digital channel to serve that mix. This level of customization helps customers to be more connected with the brand."

With the move to Progress Sitefinity Cloud, Kubota now hosts its website via the Platform-as-a-Service and integrated it with Google Places API to allow for the searching of dealer locations, various inventory management for real-time product availability, and a custom Azure Search service to display results in near real-time with robust and real-time filtering available as users search for products. Kubota also did an update to its user interface, including a complete redesign of its product detail pages (enhancing the user experience in the research journey) and its Hub pages, the creation of a custom video gallery integrated with Vimeo (which has four types of videos depending on where the user is within the purchase journey, such as lifestyle and brand, feature and benefit, application and service), and a “Mega Menu” which displays all products, select product information and product categorizations.

Kubota also did a complete overhaul of its online experience, including:

• The addition of the ability to compare products in an app-like experience

• The creation of an interactive equipment explorer and comparison tool to further evaluate product offerings 

• The addition of custom widgets that can be leveraged and customized across dealerships; one widget references dealer listings and displays the nearest dealer, and one displays content specific to models in a product series

• Synced promotions from Kubota USA’s API into custom widgets and layouts for dynamic promotion across the online experience. This added promotion content into multiple widgets across KubotaUSA.com, allowing for automatic updates in those widgets and to the dealer websites to ensure that its promotional and equipment data matches the national website.