Tata Global Beverages

Tata Global Beverages (TGB), a leading purveyor of tea, coffee and water with brands like Tetley Tea and Eight O’Clock Coffee, had a simple goal for its web presence: Motivate the visitor to pour a cup of coffee or tea, relax and spend some time on the site. Its web properties needed to reflect its corporate mantra of “bringing magical beverage moments to life.”

That meant rebuilding an umbrella corporate site to better engage a diverse audience of business users like shareholders, analysts and investors, and Tata’s consumers to create a seamless and unified user experience between the corporate site and its dozens of brand and sub brand sites—Tetley Tea alone has 19 web properties.

“The corporate site is the face of our company,” said Satya Muniasamy, Director, Global Communications, Tata Global Beverages. “It needs to present important information about the company, stock, sustainability and recognitions with a world class user experience that captures the essence of a beverage moment.”

Having made a switch from SharePoint to Progress® Sitefinity™ in 2013, TGB once again looked to Sitefinity as it was formulating a strategy to revamp its corporate site with new navigation, animation, features and responsive capabilities that would better capture both the essence of the corporate message while easing the balancing act of managing corporate and regional brand content.

“To ensure consistency and brand integrity, we needed to manage common content across all sites along with individualized regional content,” Muniasamy said. “At the same time, we wanted to improve the user experience with responsive mobile capabilities and other usability features.”

Over the past few years since TGB replaced its SharePoint system with Sitefinity, it has achieved many of its initial goals, including porting the majority of its brand sites to Sitefinity and turning control of regional content over to the appropriate brand managers. It has dramatically lowered its costs and reduced the time spent to maintain the system. Now it was time to take the next step.

“We needed to move from our standalone Sitefinity configuration to a multisite management scheme,” said Sunil Sastry, Director, Analytics and Web, Tata Global Beverages. “That would allow us to perform an upgrade once and deploy across all our sites, lowering maintenance costs and streamlining operations.”

Sitefinity multisite management allows the enterprise to manage multiple websites from one place through a single interface. Assets and content can be shared across all sites, and granular permissions authorize who can access what. Since all web properties are part of a single installation, there is only one code base to maintain and upgrade for all sites.

“I would say that the multisite management capabilities of Sitefinity have reduced the time we spend managing sites by at least 50 percent,” Sastry said. “We are planning an upgrade from Sitefinity 7.2 to 9.0 in the next few months and we know these capabilities will simplify that process.”

On a regional level, brand managers readily maintain and update local content.

“Each brand and each region has its own following,” Muniasamy said. “Sitefinity puts brand managers in control, enabling them to keep content fresh and relevant and run more effective marketing campaigns that appeal to the behavior of the local audience.”

Another important benefit to Tata Global Beverages is the fact that Sitefinity is a “light” platform.

“The light architecture of Sitefinity allows us to do so much without compromising performance,” Sastry said. “For the amount of information, images and animation the site loads and performs with amazing efficiency.”

As more and more users demand anywhere, anytime access on any device, TGB is confident in the responsive capabilities of Sitefinity. “We are still early in our mobile journey, but the site is intuitive and interactive ensuring an unmatched user experience on any device,” Muniasamy said.

When it comes to the overall user experience, Sitefinity and its multisite management capabilities helps deliver a seamless, transparent view of the corporation, enabling TGB to reach out to its global audience in a personalized way that builds customer loyalty and promotes the brand and its services.

“From the corporate site, down through our brands and sub-brands we are providing complete transparency to our consumers,” Muniasamy said. “Today’s digital consumer requires an authentic brand experience. We are confident we are conveying the story behind the brand with a personalized consumer experience that will help grow the brand and build loyalty moving forward.”