Relias breaks down organizational silos and improves CX with Adobe Commerce Cloud

As a software company operating in the healthcare space, Relias is keenly aware of the need to create an intuitive customer experience for the 11,000 healthcare organizations and the 4.5 million caregivers around the world for whom it provides digital and in-person training and education.

From its inception in 2012, Relias’ north star has always been to empower its healthcare customers to deliver the best clinical outcomes possible by elevating the performance of care teams. When it came to revamping the customer experience across its direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands, the company took on the challenge with the same ethos: how does it provide a consistent, engaging customer experience across seven different websites that were previously built on varying technology solutions?

“We wanted to create a robust and consistent digital experience. But over the past several years, we brought together a number of different e-commerce websites into our business, and that resulted in a somewhat disjointed experience for our users,” says Emily Christian, director of e-commerce domains at Relias. “For us internally, it posed a significant challenge to support these websites that were previously built on different technologies. It created unnecessary siloes of expertise.”

To consolidate its various websites under one unified technology stack, Relias turned to Adobe Commerce Cloud – which combines Magento Commerce with Adobe Experience Cloud – to take a more experience-driven approach in its retail division.

“Our investment in Adobe was about partnering with a cutting-edge company that’s going to help us grow our e-commerce business long term,” Christian says.

Agile content management drives efficiency

Thus far, Relias has completed the migration of ContinuingEducation.com to the Adobe Experience Cloud stack. As a result, the new site is responsive, mobile-friendly, and gives the Relias user experience (UX) team greater control of the customer experience (CX) without overreliance on its engineering and IT teams. Adobe Experience Manager 6.5 serves as the content management system while Magento Commerce powers the storefront part of the experience like merchandizing, product catalogue, and checkout.

Relias recently migrated ContinuingEducation.com to the Adobe Commerce Cloud stack to improve its customer experience.

Prior to the Adobe implementation, Christian says, most changes made to the website had to go through the IT team. “If we needed a change on the front end of the website, we would have to get it into a sprint, or we would have to stop another sprint if it was an urgent issue,” Christian says.

However, with the use of Experience Manager, Relias is now supporting close to 10,000 webpages on ContinuingEducation.com with significantly less reliance on their engineering team.

“Adobe Experience Manager has been a really intuitive tool …. And no longer being totally dependent on the engineering team has been a big win for our marketing and e-commerce teams. As we continue forward with our migration plans, it’s going to continue to create a lot of efficiencies and over time, I see it representing a significant savings for Relias,” she says.

Customizable e-commerce integrations

Magento Commerce, Christian says, is customizable and can integrate with a lot of other solutions, including Relias’ learning management system (LMS). At this point, Relias has implemented a direct enrollment and single sign-on (SSO) functionality between Magento Commerce and the Relias LMS so that, for example, once a provider purchases a training course, they are directly enrolled and able to access the content on the Relias LMS without having to input all their information again. Relias has also enabled a site membership subscription that auto-renews through the Magento Commerce platform and gives subscribers discounts on courses and more.

Relias has also integrated Magento Commerce with its core product database, built on Quick Base, which is the source of the company’s training catalogue. Marketo and CRM integrations are also on the company’s roadmap for personalized email marketing and customer account management.

Personalized experiences to improve engagement

According to Christian, healthcare customers today can filter trainings based on their profession and location, and these selections will follow them throughout the site. In the future, Relias hopes to dynamically personalize the retail experience based on customer profiles to offer relevant courses in their respective fields. In addition, Relias is also working on geographical personalization since all states in the U.S. have different training requirements for their healthcare providers.

Christian’s team also performs a lot of conversion rate optimization and A/B testing with custom landing pages to further personalize and improve experiences that shoppers have within the site.

“One thing we are really looking forward to testing is the way that our catalogue is displayed to users,” Christian says. “We’ll be looking at list views versus card views, and which will lead to better conversion and engagement with our training catalogue.”

Another example of personalization: During the initial months of the COVID-19 outbreak, Relias saw an increase in demand for training about infection control or how to properly wash hands or proper use of personal protection equipment on its other retail sites and the corporate website. In response, it quickly put together specific packages of learning content to help organizations and healthcare professionals get access to these refresher courses on those sites.

Relias quickly pulled together relevant COVID-19 training courses on its website to help organizations and healthcare professionals.

Customer engagement leads to increases in revenue

In the month following the implementation of Adobe Commerce Cloud, Relias saw a 14 percent lift in e-commerce transaction revenue, a 70 percent increase in conversion rate, and almost a 28 percent increase in average order value.

The improvement in the mobile experience, Christian says, is also paying dividends, with mobile web conversion up 80 percent since the implementation. Christian also expects to see benefits from her team’s work with search engine optimization.

“Our next migration is going to be for one of our retail websites that offers live online training, and this will require a new custom integration between Magento and our Relias Live Platform,” Christian says. “Our end goal is to have an ecosystem with many different features, where we can do a lot of testing on what features work well for specific user groups, and then personalize shopping experiences as well as the training that we’re bringing to healthcare providers through these different channels.”

Over the next year Relias plans to continue building out its Adobe Commerce Cloud stack, and begin using Adobe Analytics more robustly, as well as Adobe Target.

“The growth we’ve seen thus far is driven primarily by an improved user interface,” Christian says. “Our new site is a lot more modern, it’s easy to shop, and the mobile experience is much better.”