Client: Cegetel Challenge: The company's rudimentary Web portal lacked content for customers and therefore failed to generate revenue at a strategic level. Solution: Cegetel brought in CSC to provide management and consulting in portal redevelopment research, site development and content acquisition and flow. Results: Cegetel's new Web portal reduced costs in customer support, achieved roughly 300,000 visitors and 16 to 20 million hits a day, and boosted revenue from subscriptions and other service fees. Related Information Read about CSC's Hosting Services. Read about CSC's Retail offerings. Contact us and let our experience help you produce results.

At the end of 2004, French telecommunications provider Cegetel decided to tackle its biggest problem head on: its Web portal was preventing the company from achieving its strategic goals. The company chose CSC to redesign the portal, helping Cegetel position itself as one of France's top providers of broadband and value-added services.

Cegetel, one of the two consumer brands of the Neuf Cegetel group, was a latecomer to broadband, having launched its Internet-access service in January 2004. Cegetel quickly proved itself in the broadband market, but its portal still needed to define its position with respect to its competitors, whose broadband services had been available for several years.

An Internet-access provider's portal is of strategic importance. It is the default home page of its subscribers' Web browsers, an advantage Cegetel didn't want to waste. Once visitors arrive on the page, the aim is for them to find everything they are looking for and make use of all the services offered.

"At the time our portal was in the simplest form there was, a mere window without value-added content," says Laurent Van Hamme, Cegetel's vice-president for consumer Web sites and online sales. "Customer surveys showed that the portal needed information, content and depth." It therefore became a priority to totally revamp the portal.


Last off the blocks, first past the post
In January 2005, Cegetel set to work identifying its customers' needs, discovering which portals are most successful, and determining what to highlight on its own portal. "It was clear that one of the primary aims of our portal was to improve customer satisfaction while at the same time allowing us to reduce a certain number of overheads, such as telephone and e-mail support," says Van Hamme. Cegetel wanted to encourage sales of broadband subscriptions and related services via its portal, while also generating traffic and revenue through the site.

Being one of the last of the big names to join the market gave Cegetel a wider scope of action; however, it did not have sufficient internal expertise and resources. After approaching several consultancies, it chose CSC "because of their concrete and pragmatic approach,” recalls Van Hamme. “CSC also had experience in developing portals and its teams had a good attitude towards the market and competition. In addition, we wanted the portal completed quickly to produce immediate results."


Expand possibilities, respect constraints
Portal redevelopment research began in February 2005 with the creation of a list of priorities for the first version. "Studies of our customers’ habits showed that many of them chose the same search engine as their home page,” says Van Hamme. “We therefore had to offer this service to them visibly, all the more so since it generates revenue. Equally, they were responsive to the idea of personalizing their home page, of building their own little world."

CSC administered a design competition among Web agencies, allowing Cegetel to choose from several site models. Items that were not initial priorities included blogs and forums, new Web mail and the managing of bank accounts. The site needed to generate revenue, so a modest portion of it was made available for ads.


Combining customers’, partners’ interests
Customer service and support came next, and Cegetel put a series of new services online, including interactive user guides, FAQs, a glossary, and contact forms accompanied by textual hyperlinks for direct answers to users' questions.

CSC's next task, site development, included architecture research and helping Cegetel choose which tools to use. CSC developed different scenarios, using several solutions which respected Cegetel's "free software" oriented culture. Taking the models and functionality grids provided by CSC as its starting point, Cegetel chose an architecture built around Linux and MySQL and using the content management and publishing tool Spip.

CSC then worked on sales development, choosing managed content supply partners for the portal and initiated content flow management. "Cegetel needed partners who bring real benefits to their users but who are also in line with their image," explains Philippe Colin, director in charge of the portal bid at CSC. "CSC worked on identifying and describing about 100 possible partners, approving their content and describing their revenue projections and the legal terms of the contracts."

Features added to the Cegetal portal include weather updates, mobile ring tones, wallpapers, news, meetings, quizzes, horoscopes and travel. "One of the constraints linked to integrating these external flows was that we had to respect the portal's graphics charter. It's a lot harder than it seems and respecting standards isn't yet commonplace in the sector," says Colin.

Cegetel launched its portal, www.cegetel.net, on schedule in September 2005. The site was immediately profitable, achieving roughly 300,000 visitors and 16 to 20 million hits a day. The FAQ and contact forms decreased by half the number of e-mails sent by users to Cegetel's customer support. The project was so successful, in fact, that Cegetel and CSC soon began construction on the next version of the site.

"This success is closely linked to CSC's attitude," says Van Hamme. "They got involved in the project and got Cegetel's internal teams involved, too. CSC worked around our constraints in a flexible and adaptable manner and was able to carry out three different tasks involving three different needs."