Powering a User-Centric Digital Experience for Helan

Prior to their merger, Helan (then Partena) struggled with an outdated Sitecore platform that was expensive to maintain and difficult to use. The rigid architecture hindered agility, and the merger of three health insurance companies demanded a completely new digital brand identity that the legacy monolith could not support. Content editors faced significant inefficiencies, struggling with the lack of visual confirmation. As the Product Owner at Partenamut candidly described: "Easy, editing text was a huge mess in Sitecore. It was so painful to edit the text blindly without any vision on what will be the end result."

Helan (then Partina) faced several critical challenges with their existing Sitecore CMS and impending merger:

• Outdated Technology & High Costs: Their Sitecore platform was difficult to use, expensive to upgrade, and incurred high licensing costs, hindering agility and innovation.
   
• Lack of User-Friendliness: Content editors struggled with Sitecore's complexity, particularly regarding content reusability and publishing workflows, leading to inefficiencies.
   
• Merger-Driven Rebranding: The merger of three health insurance companies required a completely new digital presence and brand identity, making a simple migration impractical.
   
• Scalability & Flexibility: The need for a platform that could easily adapt to future business requirements, integrate with internal systems, and support multiple websites was paramount.

Formica, a trusted Magnolia Gold Partner, stepped in to address Helan's challenges. Instead of a migration, they embarked on building a brand new website on Magnolia from scratch, starting in January 2020. 

Formica advised against a simple migration, opting to build a brand-new website on Magnolia that prioritized user-centric design and central content management. A key innovation was the centralized product application. Liesbet D'Hondt, Digital Marketing Manager, explains: "The design of our insurance product app allows us to work with exceptional efficiency and save a considerable amount of time. All essential elements—such as pricing, unique selling points, images, and product descriptions—are centrally managed within the app." Formica also implemented deep personalization, such as displaying "Your insurance" labels for logged-in users, and consolidated the architecture using Magnolia’s multi-site functionality on Azure.

What a not logged in user sees:

What a logged-in user sees:

Key aspects of the solution include:

User-Centric Design: 

Formica focused on creating components, templates, and pages that empowered Helan's content editors, leveraging Magnolia's intuitive interface for easy content input and management. A key example is the insurance product application, where all essential elements—pricing, unique selling points, images, and descriptions—are centrally managed. From this single source, they can be seamlessly reused across product detail pages, promotional banners, and other touchpoints, ensuring consistency and efficiency.

Customized Functionality: 

While Magnolia offers robust out-of-the-box features, Formica custom-built solutions like an Elastic Search integration for enhanced search and a custom publishing queue mechanism, demonstrating Magnolia's flexibility. 

Meaningful Personalization: 

Formica implemented personalization rules to create a more relevant user experience. For instance, a product comparison component highlights the most interesting insurance for a non-logged-in user, but shows a logged-in user the specific insurance they already own. This is reinforced on the product detail page, where a yellow "Your insurance" label appears if the user owns that product.

Multi-site Implementation: 

Formica advised Helan on consolidating multiple website instances into a single Magnolia environment using multi-site functionality, drastically reducing licensing costs and simplifying maintenance.

Strategic Advisory: 

Formica continues to provide ongoing technical advice, including Magnolia version upgrades, best practices for new business requirements. "From my experience as PO of websites, the Formica support has been quite helpful," says the Product Owner of the Partenamut website. "Having an expert inside our squad has helped us grow. The team has been progressively trained and informed on Magnolia. Some business requirements were adapted because of the great Magnolia expertise."

Scalable Architecture: 

Magnolia runs in Docker containers on Helan's managed Azure cloud, ensuring scalability and high availability, and seamlessly interacts with Helan's internal microservices (OMS) for data retrieval and personalization.

The project delivered exceptional speed, with Formica refactoring for multi-site readiness in just three weeks. The new platform has drastically improved internal workflows; the Product Owner estimates: "My guess is that the integrators gained at least 30% of their time using Magnolia. It is easier to update content on the whole website using the applications build in Magnolia."

Beyond efficiency, the move has driven tangible business growth. "The launch of Magnolia has enabled us to take significant steps in optimizing our online sales funnel," says Liesbet D'Hondt. "By streamlining the customer journey, we have been able to improve conversion rates and enhance the overall digital experience for our users."

The collaboration between Helan, Formica, and Magnolia yielded significant positive outcomes:

Enhanced Content Editor Efficiency: 

Content editors experienced substantial time savings. Thanks to Magnolia’s intuitive structure, new team members can be onboarded quickly and start creating content with minimal effort. This is a stark contrast to their previous experience; the live preview feature in Magnolia is "so handy we can easily see the result," allowing editors to work confidently and even schedule publications safely. This streamlined workflow is estimated to have saved integrators at least 30% of their time.

Rapid Development & Deployment: 

Formica demonstrated exceptional agility, refactoring a non-multi-site project to be multi-site aware in just three weeks (compared to a four-month estimate) and building a complex multi-step form in two months (compared to a six-month estimate), showcasing Magnolia's development speed.

Substantial Cost Savings: 

Consolidating multiple public Magnolia instances into just two through multi-site implementation resulted in a significant reduction in licensing costs and simplified maintenance.

Tangible Business Outcomes & Improved Customer Experience: 

Beyond internal efficiencies, the new platform delivered measurable improvements in business performance. The launch enabled Helan to take significant steps in optimizing their online sales funnel, improving conversion rates, and generating more qualified leads. On a technical level, the site saw improved loading times on all devices, fewer errors and broken links, and greater stability. This directly contributed to better SEO results and a more responsive, high-quality experience for all users.

Trusted Partnership: 

Formica's deep Magnolia expertise and proactive support have established them as a trusted advisor to Helan's IT department (MLZ), leading to expanded engagement across multiple Magnolia projects and even providing training to new content editors.

Foundation for Future Growth: 

Magnolia continues to serve as a robust foundation for Helan's digital strategy, enabling future expansions, upgrades, and the potential to extend existing applications to other health insurance companies.