For more than 80 years, Ricoh has been empowering digital workplaces using innovative technologies and solutions to enable individuals to work smarter. As a leading provider of document management solutions, IT services, communications services, commercial and industrial printing, digital cameras, and industrial systems, the corporation now provides services to over 1.4 million companies across 200 countries and regions.

Realizing the fact that 67% of the buyer’s journey happens digitally, Ricoh decided to renovate its old website to provide both B2C and B2B customers with a seamless experience from the first product reference to after-purchase support for higher converting sales. The new digital solutions needed to be able to deliver global implementation along with a personalized customer experience and centralized content management for the “Single Source of Product Truth” requirement.

SITECORE ECOMMERCE IMPLEMENTATION
The SmartOSC team started the work with a site audit to closely investigate issues based on ideal and theoretical assumptions. Next, the local environment was built, including the new Sitecore XP 8.2 update 3 instance, setting up Sitecore Commerce 8.2.1, deploying Ricoh source code, restoring Ricoh’s database, and verifying local systems.

ENHANCED DATA ANALYTICS
The dysfunctionality of the assets and internal search reports generating features on the previous website stopped Ricoh from understanding their customers’ behavior. Therefore, SmartOSC proposed the idea of investigating downloaded events to generate data for the assets report in order to understand which documents generate the most interest. And the search function was configured with analytics to capture search keywords to gain a better understanding of the most searched terms by site visitors.

SWIFT REGIONAL ROLL-OUT
To serve the objective of launching regional roll-out, the SmartOSC team used the Content Import Tool as the solution for creating the Ricoh content script. MVP admin could use the Content Import Tool to import excel files for creating content pages. This helps to significantly reduce the time-to-market of websites in different regions.

SECURE & PERSONALIZED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Regarding personalization, custom profiles were created to identify contacts based on their behaviors, but they were not being used. To solve this problem, the plan of action was to create or update the profiles and apply personalization to provide tailored content to each type of user. Four new page templates were also created for Ricoh to use within the MVP, to make the website look more modern and diverse.

SYNCHRONIZED CONTENT
In order to facilitate centralized content for Ricoh to ensure the “Single Source of Product Truth”, SmartOSC’s team proposed its RA Multi Region Connector solutions. Content is migrated from the current database to RA new Content Repository. The Data Exchange Modules, comprised of standard configurations, would enable easy synchronization and faster time-to-market delivery for quick rollout in each region. The sync can be triggered manually (at first-time use or on-demand) or automatically when the content is published.