Transforming Digital Strategies: Great Clips and World Travel Holdings' Journey with dotCMS

In an insightful dotConnect24 webinar, our partners at Dragon Army and Solvisse Software Solutions shared their success stories implementing dotCMS for Great Clips and World Travel Holdings, respectively. This blog delves into the reasons for choosing dotCMS, the implementation process, and the transformative results observed post-implementation.

You can watch these two sessions by visiting dotCMS on YouTube or our video library.

Understanding the Clients and Their Business Priorities

Great Clips

Known for its nationwide chain of hair salons, Great Clips prioritizes exceptional customer service and efficient operations. Their business priority is to enhance online booking systems and improve digital marketing initiatives to attract and retain customers. It’s hugely important for the company to ensure that every touchpoint across its digital ecosystem makes online check-in easy, continues to drive salon visits, and delivers great customer service.

We needed a tool that was simple,” said Lauren Wishna, VP of Client Services at Dragon Army. “A simple user interface that the clients can use and maintain. And then we also needed something that was complex enough that had the capabilities that we wanted, both for today, but even functionality that we haven’t thought of or want to do in the future.

World Travel Holdings

As one of the largest cruise agencies, World Travel Holdings focuses on delivering seamless booking experiences and engaging travel content to its customers. Their priority lies in leveraging digital platforms to simplify the booking process and provide enriching content that enhances customer engagement.

One of our biggest complications is that we are maintaining multiple sites, over 5,000 different brands,” said Lisa Mccusker, Principal Web UI Developer at World Travel Holdings. “So we need to be able to maintain each brands’ unique identity. Each one of our customers has a unique voice, and each one of our customers wants to bring a different type of product to their guests.

The Drive for a New CMS

Both Great Clips and World Travel Holdings faced significant limitations with their old CMS platforms, which restricted their ability to scale and adapt to changing digital demands.

Great Clips was hindered by a non-intuitive CMS that made content updates cumbersome and time-consuming.

World Travel Holdings dealt with an outdated system that lacked integration capabilities with newer technologies, hindering effective content management and customer interaction. Much like Great Clips’ previous challenges, their primary concern was the system's inability to quickly update content, which is crucial for a travel agency that needs to continuously update trip details, prices, and offers.

These challenges prompted the need for a more robust, flexible, and user-friendly CMS to meet their growing digital needs.

Case Study

Great Clips launches over 150 site pages on dotCMS

The world’s leading salon brand uses dotCMS’ headless, multi-tenant capabilities to launch multiple sites and hundreds of pages on one dotCMS instance.

Choosing dotCMS Over Other Platforms

The decision to switch to dotCMS was driven by its universal features built to simplify content creation and delivery to save costs and grow revenue, a priority that aligned perfectly with the clients' requirements.

Dragon Army and Solvisse Solutions conducted a thorough assessment of various CMS options, such as Magnolia and StoryBlok. They considered factors like ease of use, scalability, integration functionalities, and cost-effectiveness.

Both clients valued dotCMS's customizable content workflows, multi-tenant support, robust security features, and its ability to go beyond headless with universal CMS capabilities - which other platforms in the market lack.

I think a lot of the tools that we’ve found can be simple but probably have more limited design boundaries,” said Lauren Wishna, VP of Client Services at Dragon Army. “Or they can be really complex, but then, only a developer really knows how to use it.

Impactful Results and Success Post-Implementation

Both Great Clips and World Travel Holdings are now utilizing dotCMS to revolutionize their content delivery and customer engagement strategies. For global enterprise organizations like them, the transition to dotCMS involved migrating vast amounts of content, setting up tailored content workflows, and training teams to leverage the new system effectively. This was all done with the help of partners Dragon Army and Solvisse, along with the dotCMS world-class support and professional services.

When it comes to traditional, hybrid, and headless content management, you have the best of both worlds in dotCMS,” said Maikel Pereira, CEO of Solvisse Software Solutions.

World Travel Holdings’ dotCMS website is in the final stages of going live, featuring new streamlined operations and enhanced content management capabilities. dotCMS’ robust data handling capabilities now enable them to manage extensive travel data and present it effectively to end-users, enhancing the quality and speed of the booking experience.

It doesn't matter if they are a full service developer who can write Java code, or if there’s somebody who is a marketer who just wants to change a message, any one of them can then go in and easily build one of these pages, link it to our site, push it our, and we’re done,” said Lisa Mccusker, Principal Web UI Developer at World Travel Holdings.

Using dotCMS, Great Clips is now able to host its franchisee website and customer-facing website on a single dotCMS instance. This allows Great Clips to maintain brand consistency while publishing localized and personalized content across all of its sites.

Since migrating to the dotCMS solution, both Great Clips and World Travel Holdings have seen remarkable improvements:

Operational Efficiency: Streamlined content management processes have significantly reduced the time and resources spent on managing digital content.
Customer Engagement: Enhanced capabilities in personalizing customer interactions have led to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Business Growth: The robust features of dotCMS have allowed both companies to scale their digital presence, adapt to market changes more swiftly, and achieve their business goals effectively.

This success story underscores the pivotal role of a suitable CMS in transforming digital strategies. For Great Clips and World Travel Holdings, switching to dotCMS has not only solved their previous challenges but has also equipped them with the tools to drive future growth and success in their respective industries.