Unifying Disjointed Experiences with a User-Centric Digital Platform

Choosing a Digital Solution

When compared to products from competitors such as IBM and Oracle, Liferay came out on top thanks in large part to its connectivity and extensibility, authentication tools and ease-of-use. Additionally, Liferay offered the ability to have different departments and internal players working seamlessly on a unified platform — a key benefit to Desjardins’s desire to improve internal organization and workflows.

Two-Part Implementation Leads to Cohesion

As with any company-wide change in technology, Desjardins’s main challenge was to spread knowledge and resources as well as educate in-house developers. The success of Desjardins’s implementation can be credited to their two-part process and their partnership with a local integrator firm specializing in open-source software with significant Liferay expertise.

First, Desjardins focused on organization by creating what they called a “center of expertise” so that all necessary resources and training information regarding the day-to-day use of Liferay would be readily available to stakeholders. They also set up a dedicated training team that demonstrated Liferay to help facilitate the company-wide implementation.

The second phase of their process was the actual implementation of the platform. By implementing Liferay on their existing architecture, Desjardins was able to centralize costs and render the coherent use of the platform across different project initiatives. This also equipped internal teams such as marketing and IT with the necessary tools and resources for their use of the platform.

Clear Goals Result in Clear Improvement

Since the challenges Desjardins chose to address with Liferay affected different areas of their business, the impact of their results can be seen across a variety of touchpoints.

Intranet: Since employees needed a digital workplace, Desjardins uses Liferay as such. It helps in their aim to simplify organizational complexity by streamlining communication with employees and providing services such as self-help service care and tracking solutions via integration with third-party tools.

Agent Portal: Disjointed and siloed information used by Desjardins’s retail banking, credit and insurance agents are now unified — equipping agents to better serve customers. Practically, this can look like a Desjardins banking advisory solution using Liferay to access customer portfolio from any device.

Partner Portal: Looking for a scalable solution for their vast partner network, Liferay enabled Desjardins to build effective partner portals via white-labelling strategies.

“In terms of ranking metrics, traffic has doubled on external platforms from year to year, especially among business users whose goal is to promote their products through the Desjardins platform,” said William Longmene Kue.