The Samsung story
Samsung's Members platform was initially a mobile-only platform and was intended to keep Samsung customers engaged.
The D2C team of Samsung Electronics Germany (SEG), which is responsible for the website and its online shops for the German market, has taken on the Members platform, collaborating closely with Cheil on the project, an agency that works with Samsung globally for its technical digital environment management.
As the program grew, the CMS of the Members platform in place was no longer capable of meeting its needs. To keep their platform up-to-date and provide customers with a better digital experience, Samsung needs a flexible platform management solution.
The team has since been on a hunt to start a pilot to rebuild the Members platform.
Project blockers
Lengthy local request process
The Samsung Group is a multinational company, and the company owns the digital content management globally. As a company's local focus might not coincide with its global focus, it has historically been a challenge to provide local solutions for individual subsidiaries. Requesting new components is often time-consuming due to global governance issues.
It has been a problem especially if the requirements are so specific that the current template-based Enterprise CMS lacks the components to meet them.
Inefficient content management
Technically, managing the Members platform and updating content was difficult because of the static setup and code base of the CMS in place. It was impossible for editors to change content by themselves.
Cheil developers must handle all the changes, build local solutions statically, then package and upload them. It means that every update requires a local build pipeline and CMS deployment. For Samsung, that wasn't an ideal way to maximize resources.
Hard to connect with non-mobile consumers
Samsung is perhaps best known for its cutting-edge smartphone designs. Unsurprisingly, Samsung wanted to keep its mobile users happy. As a result, the Members program initially started with mobile apps only.
Nevertheless, Samsung also offers a wide range of electrical appliances. Once the team took over the program, they strived to make the rest of the users happy too. Relaunching the Members website and finding a more efficient way to provide information to users was evidently needed. This challenge could not be met by the CMS platform in place - replicating mobile app functionality would require many microservices, components not only rely on the content that needs to be created, but also on other APIs from the Members platform.
Project needs
Adopt a flexible modern architecture
The Samsung team knew they had to come up with a way to deliver the local components faster to overcome the general global governance barrier, reduce the complexity of the architecture, and deliver more quickly on local requirements. Meanwhile, to improve the digital experience for website users, they need to replicate mobile app features efficiently into the website.
API-driven headless approaches seem to be the best choice here. The project also required a scalable, design-agnostic solution to deliver content in a flexible, single page application based on React.js.
Separate the content layer from the presentation layer
Samsung needed a solution that enables the content team and the development team to work independently. Content managers and publishers should be able to handle the regular content relaunch so the developers can focus on adding features and improving the platform.
On the developer side, Cheil needed a scalable on-demand solution that could cover the technical requirements without additional infrastructure, reducing the cost of ownership for setup and operations. Therefore, Samsung will be able to leverage resources on the agency side better, save time, and implement content faster.
Gather user knowledge in the cookieless world
In light of the decreasing popularity of third-party cookies, Samsung was looking for alternative ways to engage with customers. Loyalty programs provide the best means of learning about users in this situation. Ideally, they should be able to gather user data through different touchpoints and then be able to predict better users' interests and deliver them personalized experiences.
The team realizes that it needs a flexible content model that meets all the requirements for building the customer knowledge base. Ultimately, the solution should increase customer engagement rate and encourage them to stay on the platform.
The current setup
The Members platform is the core service in which all of the members' data is kept. It is integrated with the following services:
- An authentication service for the Samsung accounts
- A promotion tool
- Secondary systems like online shop that is built on SAP Hybrid commerce cloud
- A series of microservices
With the setup, it comes naturally for Samsung to rely on the API driven solution to fetch different information together and consolidate in the platform.
Hygraph’s solution
Composable architecture
Samsung has chosen Hygraph for its API-driven headless approach. With the out of the box support for GraphQL, frontend developers can focus on building features without involving backend developers. With Hygraph, Samsung can now deliver content in a flexible, design-agnostic way.
With the modular and composable components, the content team and development team can also work independently that enables faster time to market. They no longer need to mold inflexible technologies, but were instead able to work with tools and microservices to build a composable Members platform.
Content Modeling
By using Hygraph's content modeling feature, Samsung can create a clear content structure, model content, and create custom workflows. Samsung does not need to set up any additional infrastructure and can simply start the pilot. The team can easily grade the page and test different setups and models.
Intuitive UI
Onboarding was made easy with Hygraph's intuitive UI. With the easy-to-use interface, even new content managers and publishers can update content in no time, while developers can work on critical features and enhancements. For developers, they could build queries quickly and test them almost instantly, allowing them to shape content models flexibly.
Everything else that also catered for scalability
Among other features, Samsung also liked the detailed developer resources and documentation for various tech stacks. The team was happy to find that Hygraph integrates easily with most modern tech stacks (React.js in their case). Last but not least, Hygraph's Customer Success Manager has also been a great help when needed.
Key benefits
- Improved content workflows for local custom solutions
- Increased Developer productivity by relieving them from content updates
- Half the expected turnaround time and time to market for page updates
- An estimated 15% increase in user engagement on website pages with more frequent updates