Southern Phone utilizes dotCMS hybrid-headless capabilities to create personalized content and improve workflows
Intro
Southern Phone is one of Australia's largest fixed line, mobile, and Internet communications services providers. Formed in 2002 after receiving $4.77 million in funding from the Australian Government’s Networking the Nation scheme, their mission is to deliver affordable telecommunications services to regional communities. Southern Phone serves a national consumer and business customer base that covers all parts of Australia and has created over 250 jobs across Moruya, Bendigo, and Melbourne. The company was acquired by AGL Energy in 2019 and is a 100% subsidiary of the AGL Energy Limited Group, which has been dedicated to delivering sustainable, secure, and affordable energy to Australians since 1837.
Challenge
From Crashes to Control: Southern Phone’s CMS Transformation
Under their former content management system (CMS) provider, Prismic, Southern Phone experienced various issues, including poor customer support, limited features, and even their entire website crashing for days at a time. These issues led to a poor customer experience and impacts on revenue.
Because of the important global and national regulations of telecommunications organizations, Southern Phone’s legal team is involved in publishing all new website content. Without a workflow process inside their CMS, marketers were required to manually send documents to the legal department before each new publication. Without a CMS that could handle approval workflows, the process of publishing content was slow and at risk of unintentional oversight.
Prismic’s inability to provide any personalization features limited Southern Phone’s ability to create targeted content experiences for different audiences and campaigns across digital touchpoints for current customers and within the sales cycle.
When the marketing team needed to go to market with a new webpage, new campaign, or even small website amendments, they were held back by developer dependencies. Southern Phone needed a CMS that allowed their teams to create, customize, and publish content in a No-Code format. In addition, content teams needed automated deployment so they were no longer required to manually publish content on a specific day and time.
With an almost 10-hour time difference from their former CMS provider, Southern Phone knew they needed a global CMS partner with around-the-clock support. The final straw that pushed them to search for a new content management solution was a critical website failure that crashed multiple sites across their platform- an issue that took almost two weeks to resolve because of the lack of communication from Primic’s support team. This prevented any new sales from being made through their site during this time, along with the risk of having the important information and documents that were housed on these webpages no longer available.
dotCMS empowers us to seamlessly bridge the gap between content creation and delivery, offering unparalleled flexibility and scalability. Its robust API capabilities allow us to craft personalized digital experiences efficiently, ensuring our content reaches the right audience.
Dean Stewart
Head of Telco Product Operations, AGL Australia
Solution
Southern Phone Breaks Boundaries with dotCMS
After investigating multiple software solutions on the market, Southern Phone chose dotCMS because it provided them with everything they needed from a new CMS- and more.
With the help of dotCMS partners, Raak, Southern Phone can rely on an Australia-based team to do the heavy lifting of their website migration while their in-house team focuses on creating new content and serving their customers.
With dotCMS, multiple teams across Southern Phone can now easily create and manage sophisticated, multi-step workflows - in parallel. Using dotCMS sophisticated automation features, they can send new content out for approval or subactions, integrate 3rd-party systems through plugins, pre-schedule publications to their site or social media, and more.
Personalization in dotCMS has given Southern Phone new-found control over its marketing campaigns. Marketing teams can now publish targeted content and create relevant customer experiences across every channel and touchpoint in the customer journey. Prospective customers can find content tailored to their needs based on where they click, their current telecommunications networks, and their geographic location.
With its Hybrid-Headless capabilities, dotCMS has allowed Southern Phone’s marketing teams to stay in control of content authoring, layout design, workflow creation, and content modeling without any developer assistance- even if their development team deploys dotCMS headlessly.
Southern Phone has a direct and personal relationship with dotCMS support. They understand the urgency of quickly identifying and providing a solution to problems and working proactively to prevent them. By offering various levels of professional support to fit individual businesses’ needs, dotCMS has given Southern Phone the freedom to set their own standard of hands-on developer and customer support.