Delivering the future of customer experience and loyalty for Greene King

Greene King is the leading pub retailer and brewer in the UK with 2,700 pubs, restaurants, and hotels. Wanting to make every customer moment matter, Greene King initially called on VML to help them understand their customers’ journeys across all touchpoints, define future journeys and set out a roadmap to take them there. Over an 18-month period and with a cross functional team of experts VML provided:

Customer Experience – mapped current and future customer journeys, developed a brand agnostic content framework and social, app and loyalty strategy
UX & UI - created a design system that gives structural flexibility to 1,000+ Greene King websites (1x corporate, 10+brand and 1000+ pub level)
People & Process – assessed current capabilities and defined a future operating model and new ways of working to realize the transformation strategy
Tech, Tooling & Data – documented the existing tech stack and designed a future state architecture, created a measurement strategy, executed DXP & DAM implementation inc. a plan and support across content migration

Following this, Greene King named VML as their strategic partner for digital transformation.

It’s important that our websites are user-friendly and customers have a consistent and positive experience using them. VML has been instrumental in helping us to improve the experience and drive revenue across multiple websites. Their experience with Sitecore’s market-leading platform is second to none, and we are delighted that we now have the digital foundations we need to support our omnichannel strategy, while also streamlining the workflows for our digital teams so they can focus on creating content that resonates with our customers.

Andy Lewis

Head of Digital Products, Greene King

Greene King’s websites are an essential element in the brand’s vision to “make every customer moment matter from the first interaction with Greene King’s portfolio of brands to their long-term loyalty”. The brewery recognizes that the quality of the digital experience influences where potential customers choose to dine and drink. Every year, Greene King aims to convert millions of website visits into bookings and walk-in pub visits.

Previously, Greene King’s websites were spread across 80 different web domains, which led to time-consuming manual management and costly upgrades when a platform reached end of life. This disparate approach also required digital teams to rebuild features for each website, which resulted in high costs and long lead times.

To meet ever-changing customer needs, Greene King wanted to establish a resilient, future-proof digital platform. The new web environment needed to support outstanding customer experiences, drive engagement and boost conversion rates, while empowering marketing teams to efficiently deliver digital content that resonates with customers.

VML created a resilient and robust, future-proof platform that consolidated Greene King’s over 1,700 websites, hosted on 80 different domains to a single environment.

The new platform uses composable Sitecore technologies (Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) and Sitecore Experience Manager (XM), hosted via the Sitecore Managed Cloud), aligned with Greene King’s digital strategy, which aims to simplify architecture, leverage cloud services, and integrate with other systems. Greene King can now streamline content creation and management and easily support new brand development initiatives going forward.

Having created content frameworks and a DAM strategy to understand Greene King’s detailed business requirements, VML recommended Sitecore Content Hub and Sitecore Content Hub Operations to provide an end-to-end platform that makes it easier for teams to find and reuse assets across every channel (Web, App, CRM, Social). Teams now have access to prebuilt features and components, eliminating the need to rebuild capabilities for each site and ensuring consistency with digital design guidelines.

The Sitecore solutions also integrate seamlessly with the tools needed to drive quality and maintain a best-in-class experience, such as automated testing and vulnerability identification. As part of the transformation, Greene King has established a continuous improvement team with standardized working practices across the full web development lifecycle, from architecture and developing to testing, release, and support.

As a result of the transformation, Greene King has increased customer booking conversions, streamlined content creation and management, and can easily support new brand development initiatives.

Greene King now has the foundations it needs to rapidly build tailored websites that align with its branding, which will help the company achieve its digital ambitions and support business development projects.

The website transformation has resulted in a:

4% increase in website sessions
0.6% increase in booking conversions
37% Expected 5-year ROI from increased booking conversions
23% Improvement in click-through to book

Greene King has improved the online user experience in multiple ways with its refresh. For example, sites are now optimized for mobile devices, which represent over 70% of its users, while greater site speed and performance have boosted Google rankings.

They have also enhanced accessibility for increased inclusivity, updated copy to streamline customer journeys, and made it easier for users to book a table. The company can now better understand customer behavior and conduct testing to enable continuous improvement. For example, the digital team identified that by increasing the prominence of the book button, it was able to enhance click-through to book by 23%. These capabilities combined with streamlined workflows help boost internal efficiency and cultivate a more collaborative way of working between IT, digital, and partner teams.

At a Glance

23%

Improvement in click-through to book

At a Glance

Over 1,700

Pub websites migrated

At a Glance

37%

Expected 5-year ROI from increased booking conversions

VML Celebrates at Sitecore Experience Awards 2024

We're thrilled to announce that VML has won "Best Content Management Modernization" for our work in the UK with Greene King.

Kathie Johnson, Chief Marketing Officer at Sitecore said, "Each Sitecore Experience Award category winner is creating world-class digital customer experiences. The marketing, brand, and developer teams behind these business-impacting strategies are delivering relevant content faster and driving meaningful interactions with customers on the digital platforms that matter most. We’re delighted to shine a spotlight on their successes and to congratulate all of them, along with their partners."

Helping to make every customer moment matter

Andy Lewis

Head of Digital Products, Greene King

Challenge

Solution

Growth

At a Glance

At a Glance

At a Glance

VML Celebrates at Sitecore Experience Awards 2024

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