Profound - Creating a better customer experience
Storyblok is the first headless CMS that works for developers & marketers alike.
Profound is an award-winning experience design agency obsessed with building solutions for better customer experiences. They are well established as a high quality Experience Design/Digital Transformation agency in the UK delivering compelling UX design experiences on many famous ecommerce brand sites.
In their work, they provide a rare combination - a passionate focus on the customer experience and UX design, coupled with a very strong technical capability using modern platforms to deliver better agility and flexibility.
They are able to help their clients understand the customer journey (pain points, motivators etc), and hold that up as a mirror to the business to inform the best way to architect a digital estate required to support it - this is where Profound really differentiates.
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Goals and roadmap to project success
With a portfolio covering a variety of services, Profound aims to deliver a first class customer experience which is aligned with each client’s business ambition and supported by modern, future-proof technologies. In doing so, they are also sensitive to the fact that each business they work with is on a digital journey of their own, with different levels of readiness. As such, the project pace and deliverables are always tailored to ensure all the stakeholders (business and IT) are active participants in a roadmap they can actually believe in.
With each new project, the first conversation starts with understanding ‘the customer experience’, which includes the needs of internal business users. It may be a website or ecommerce replatform, technical architecture re-think, data optimisation or UX design - regardless of the context, Profound gathers and intelligently harnesses customer insight to inform decisions, and this removes all the bias and opinion that blights many projects.
Of course, no digital ambition can be achieved without the right tech stack, and Profound’s preferred approach is to use a technology mix based on a MACH architecture.
A few years ago, frustrated with the constraints that monolithic systems enforced on the user experience, Profound chose to deliver their digital transformations using modern headless (MACH) microservices technologies. This ensures a separated front-end, delivering unfettered user experiences for brands and businesses.Their award-winning design pedigree is now enhanced by their engineering experts implementing modern systems which include web CMS, Ecommerce, Search, PIM, DAM, CDP and OMS.
The agency has their own mediation layer for orchestrating API’s and accelerating project delivery, and they typically provide a composable architecture that includes MACH architected systems such commercetools (ecommerce), Algolia (search), Pimberly (PIM), and Bynder (DAM). This provides a strong foundation, the back end capability, on which they then build an intelligently designed, customer-evidenced front-end design, often using React or similar approach.
Storyblok is a reasonably priced solution that has provided a key component in the composable stack that fits with the modern digital approach delivery for clients. It delivers on two important fronts - the technical architecture, and the ease of use for business users.
Journey to Storyblok
In their experience, Profound observes that the only real limitation in any digital transformation is the level of courage in stakeholder minds to move away from old ways of working and outdated systems.
Most businesses know that serving the customer in the best way with the right information, product or experience is, ultimately, their one true differentiator, yet they often remain trapped in a loop of repeating the same mistakes. They continue the old way of starting a project with an RFP whereas modern, forward thinking businesses today will instead use a technology agnostic partner (like Profound) to focus on understanding the business ambition, their customers’ journeys, and then select the appropriate technology solutions.
Most clients are looking for more business agility, reduced duplication of effort and an ability to serve increasingly demanding customer experience needs across multiple channels and devices. They are realising they cannot rely on old style monolithic platforms to manage and serve content efficiently. They want business users focused on their job (not fighting technology) and they want their IT staff focused on value-adding innovation and less time on support, maintenance and upgrades.
When you consider all this, the answer is to provide a headless solution, and an intelligent, customer evidenced implementation.
Storyblok has all the right technical credentials for a modern (MACH) digital estate - but if you don’t “bring along” the business users and content editors with easy-to-use authoring and editing, the project is dead. Storyblok gives clients that edge - and the positive reaction from business users at our clients has demonstrated this.
Profound’s first contact with Storyblok was through a client who was already using the headless CMS. The client was seeking help with their eCommerce system, and as soon as the agency took a closer look at Storyblok they were impressed.
Along the way, they have had scenarios where the client has considered a few CMS options, and quickly opted for Storyblok.
Storyblok handles not just the technical demands of scale and performance but, crucially, it satisfies the end users with its easy authoring and content management. You cannot underestimate the importance and power that has because once the system is in place - you need a happy user community.
Partner of the Month
An obsession with providing a great customer experience, a strong ability to align with each client’s digital journey, and headless solution expertise. With this approach, Profound is highly successful in helping digital teams design great experiences, making smart technology choices, and delivering successful digital transformations.
We are happy and proud to announce that they are the December Storyblok Partner of the Month!
You can get in touch with them by visiting their website or contacting them. You can also find them on our partners list.
