The Vodafone New Zealand challenge
Providing over 3 million connections to both consumer and business customers, Vodafone New Zealand is one of the leading digital services and connectivity companies in New Zealand. It covers more than 98% of the places where Kiwis live, work and play.
Originally a subsidiary of the European telco group of the same name, the 2,000-person operator is now jointly owned by New Zealand’s Infratil and Canada-based Brookfield Asset Management.
Three years back, the firm decided at a corporate level to move off an existing Oracle-based solution, and if possible, to do so in a very short timeframe—three months or fewer. To complicate matters, its content function also needed to migrate off a separate Drupal-based content management system (CMS).
The team was very much in the market for an easy-to-use but highly functional new content creation engine that could offer a superior editorial experience, but that, ideally, would also be one where its digital marketers could manage and publish without any heavy requirement for help from the IT team.
Any new system also had to fully support the website’s primary function of being a great e-commerce experience and support a planned corporate rebranding to One New Zealand in early 2023.
The Brightspot solution for Vodafone New Zealand
The new system had to offer smoother content workflows than the team was previously living with and also allow the site to retain all of the existing Vodafone New Zealand design and identity.
Brightspot was identified as the best way to meet not just these needs but also the challenges of migrating from the legacy Oracle and Drupal infrastructure. Another factor for the team in selecting Brightspot was its wide range of integrations, as the system had to work with another forthcoming back-end change. This was the planned introduction of the Amazon Kendra enterprise intelligent search across all of Vodafone New Zealand's digital properties.
The outcome for Vodafone New Zealand
Once the decision was made to move ahead with Brightspot, the local New Zealand team was able to rapidly migrate all articles from the older CMS.
One major productivity aid that helped with this transition and is still a major benefit is a new custom content type created for Vodafone New Zealand users, known internally as Guided Assist. This makes it easy to both publish, maintain and update online information such as FAQ pages.
And since that original replatforming project, Brightspot has continued to help with the brand’s continuing evolution, with several new sites being designed and successfully rolled out as part of the forthcoming rebrand to One New Zealand.
Here and elsewhere, Brightspot has emerged as the company’s favored CMS and as a valued content advisory partner. A big driver of all this success was the company’s very early decision, with Brightspot’s help, to adopt the GraphQL query language as its prime means of pushing content to all its sites and apps.
Vodafone New Zealand in brief
