Accelerating time-to-market for Volvo Trucks’ digital-only truck launch with AEM Edge Delivery Services
The challenge
Volvo Trucks North America, an innovative brand in the trucking space, manufactures heavy-duty vehicles for 130 countries worldwide. Its products are innovative business tools for transportation operations, which deliver on quality, safety, and sustainability.
In 2023, Volvo Trucks reached a crossroads where they wanted to transition to a new content management system (CMS), having outgrown their legacy solution. They wanted a cloud-based solution that would unlock faster time-to-market and allow them to adopt new functions, technology, and features that come down the pipeline in future years.
They wanted to achieve ‘editor excellence’ so that simple changes, like updating hero images or updating site copy, could be done instantly, unlocking more time for creativity and collaboration. With the current climate of high content demand, teams needed to be able to execute content distribution on the fly. Cognizant Netcentric was the Adobe partner they chose to enable achieving these goals. We proposed a bold new CMS Adobe’s AEM Edge Delivery Services (EDS) and then implemented it in record time.
In 2024, an added requirement brought an unexpected turn to the project: the vision of a state-of-the-art product launch for Volvo Trucks’s new VNL truck. “Designed to change everything”, Volvo Trucks needed a digital experience to match the innovation of this product. With trucking historically a digital laggard, this project opened up seismic opportunities for Volvo Trucks to set a new benchmark for digital experience in its industry with the first-ever digital-only launch of a new truck.
The solution
Volvo Trucks continued their journey with Cognizant Netcentric to deliver a powerful new digital experience for this historical truck launch leveraging EDS, building on what was already implemented in 2023. Given the short 6 month timeline, Volvo Trucks saw it vital to transition from a waterfall approach to delivery to an agile one and this project was key to continuing that organizational journey.
Volvo Trucks embraced a ‘fail fast’ approach, nailing down its requirements first and then delivering at pace to meet business objectives without compromising on any of those initial requirements. With our leading expertise in large-scale EDS projects, Cognizant Netcentric helped ensure Volvo had a platform they could trust for this brand milestone.
Volvo Trucks’s new digital experience - the digital-only truck launch - included an updated visualizer and configurator tool which allowed users to ‘build their own’ truck, with different features and colors. The uptake of this tool compared to Volvo Trucks’s legacy configurator stood at 991% more builds than previously, showing that this transformation has led to tangibly increased customer engagement.
The outcome
The results for our client here are twofold. In the immediate sense, together, we executed a highly successful product launch which positions them as a digital innovator in their sector, offering a new way of showcasing trucking products that deliver on customer needs and drive sales.
The launch event included a dynamic and engaging new web design, new site features and capabilities including its powerful new configurator, and dramatically improved SEO rankings allowing more customers to find and learn about their products. This led to a 21% lower bounce rate and 350% higher site visitors for the launch.
In the longer term, Volvo Trucks will benefit from a more streamlined content supply chain, optimized and simplified tools for content editors, and a CMS that can be built upon and expanded to take instant advantage of new technology.
Its sites function better, like its dealer locator which now pulls back-end data through for the user instantly, and displays it more rapidly, more intuitively, and with added functions. Volvo will benefit from improved long-term SEO performance, greater team agility and flexibility to pivot onto sprint projects, and an optimized mobile experience too.
The trucking industry is thought of as ‘old-school’, lagging behind the digital maturity curve. You can learn more about how this project helped position our client as the digital trailblazer for its industry in the Adobe Summit session, in which Volvo Trucks’ Joe Salling and Will Bender showcased their new solution and the roadmap to get there.
Get in touch
Interested in accelerating your time-to-market? Talk to us about how AEM Edge Delivery Services can support your customer experience strategy.
