Client background

For almost 50 years, this client has grown into an international leader in lighting technology. The client provides lighting solutions across industries with innovative solutions and products.

The business challenge

The client engaged Baker Tilly to guide and support the development of a new customer-facing web portal. This web portal aims to reduce their call volume in customer support and to increase the satisfaction and effectiveness of their customers. When the organization sells theatre equipment to dealers, distributors and sales reps, users at those organizations need to stay informed about their order statuses and information about part and component pricing. The client’s partners are often on-the-go, working onsite at theatre installations or on repairs, so mobile access and usability was also a priority.

Strategy and solution

Baker Tilly provided product delivery and strategy consulting alongside design and development expertise to help the client move quickly on addressing their pain points. The team prioritized agile development principles and partnered with the organization’s IT professionals to develop their website, strategize the entire product development approach and coach the client’s team members on best practices for iterative software development.

In just four months, the Baker Tilly team took the organization’s vision from concept to production. We guided them through requirements discovery and documentation, establishing a quality-oriented development life cycle, design of an effective user experience, forecasting, delivery of a solution into production and organizational readiness for a long-term web product life cycle with frequent and agile enhancements.

A month after the first feature launch, 100% of the client’s surveyed customers responded that they strongly or somewhat agreed that the new site was clear and helpful, easy to use and allowed them to find the information they needed. Beta users of the first feature responded extremely positively with the improvements on their existing tools with comments like:

• "This does more to relieve my support strain than anything else happening over the last few years."
• “I already see it light years beyond [the current solution].”
• “It’s cut back on the calls to PM/SM that we need to make just to check on status or tracking info.”
• “[This] has the potential to be one of the most useful tools as a dealer and especially a PM that I could have.”

With a successful first feature release and quick initial responses to feedback for additional enhancements, the team continued past the initial production launch to both iterate on the site’s features and to establish a product road map. Going into a second phase for maturation of the website, the client has shared, "We met with other companies, and I don't think we would be where we are now if we had not worked with Baker Tilly."