Elevating Customer Experience and Operational Efficiency with Sitecore XM Cloud

Our client is major North American property and casualty insurance provider ranked in the Fortune 500. They offer auto, home, business and life insurance through a network of independent insurance agents.

Challenge

While the client remained committed to Sitecore as their core digital experience platform, their existing monolithic CMS (Sitecore XP) was no longer meeting the needs of their business or customers. Despite paying for the full suite of marketing and analytics capabilities, these features were largely underutilised, resulting in an inefficient, fragmented, and under-optimised digital environment. Customer feedback and performance data revealed ongoing issues with user experience, navigation, and content discoverability, directly impacting customer satisfaction, increasing helpdesk call volumes, and limiting the organisation’s ability to deliver targeted, personalised digital experiences.

Compounding these challenges was the rapid growth of the client’s suite of customer specific applications, each generating valuable interaction data that remained siloed and difficult to analyse collectively. Without unified, actionable analytics or the ability to orchestrate personalisation across all digital touchpoints, the organisation struggled to optimise customer journeys, improve acquisition, and proactively reduce support volumes. At the same time, the existing infrastructure was costly, difficult to maintain, and poorly aligned to the scalable, flexible architecture required to support future growth.

Recognising these limitations, the client saw a clear opportunity to simplify their technology stack, reduce operational overhead, and future proof their digital ecosystem by transitioning to a SaaS-based, headless CMS model with Sitecore XM Cloud. The transition would address critical priorities including migrating from their legacy CMS without disruption, redesigning a scalable information architecture, modernising site design and UX, enabling rapid, continuous deployment pipelines, consolidating and transforming legacy content, deploying unified analytics across web and apps, delivering AI-powered search, and enabling personalisation at scale.

This complex transformation would demand both technical expertise and strategic change management, areas where Engage Squared’s experience in large scale, cloud first digital transformations was essential.

Solution

Engage Squared was engaged to deliver a modern, cloud-native digital platform built on Sitecore XM Cloud, along with integrated DXP capabilities including CDP, Personalise, and Search overcoming legacy CMS limitations and aligning the client’s digital channels with a scalable, future ready architecture. Despite working with newly released, rapidly maturing Sitecore SaaS products and bespoke client infrastructure constraints, the team successfully delivered a tailored, robust solution.

This included:

• Modern Development Workflow Design:  Established a clear, efficient workflow blending frontend (React/TypeScript) and back-end (Sitecore JSS/SXA) responsibilities to streamline component development, reduce rework, and maintain Experience Editor compatibility.
• Custom DevOps Integration:  Developed custom CI/CD pipelines using GitLab runners to support builds on the client’s internal GitLab instance, integrating seamlessly with the Sitecore Cloud Portal, an uncommon configuration in XM Cloud deployments.
• Information Architecture & Taxonomy Definition:  Designed and implemented a scalable information architecture and taxonomy model, defining reusable categories, content types, SEO metadata, JSON-LD schemas, and search facets, a critical enabler for personalisation, search optimisation, and structured content management.
• Content Migration & Transformation: Migrated and transformed 600+ blogs and associated media into the new platform, ensuring content consistency, metadata alignment, and taxonomy tagging.
• Advanced Analytics Deployment: Implemented Sitecore CDP analytics across the website and customer apps, capturing detailed interaction events such as clicks, form submissions, scroll depth, and modal opens supporting customer journey optimisation and data driven decision making.
• Personalisation & Experimentation: Enabled audience targeting, personalisation, and A/B testing through Sitecore Personalise, delivering relevant, tailored experiences to improve engagement and conversions.
• AI-Powered Search Implementation:  Delivered a powerful Sitecore Search solution with indexed content, custom taxonomies, tagging, boosting, predictive results, and AI-driven recommendations.
• Customer Enablement & Change Management: Proactively supported client adoption through:
  • Professionally produced training videos
  • As-built documentation and best practice guides
  • A comprehensive style guide and component library embedded within the solution
  • Regular ‘show and tell’ sessions for early feedback on in progress technology
  • Guidance on missing or incomplete requirements, including taxonomy, content modelling, and security policies.
• Leveraging SXA Framework: Utilised Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) to fast-track development, enabling reusable components, variants for flexible design options (e.g. one banner component with five display variants), built-in navigation, redirect tools, and responsive grid systems significantly reducing build time and cost.

Result

The transition from Sitecore XP to Sitecore XM Cloud has fundamentally reshaped the client’s digital landscape, delivering both immediate and long-term business impact. By modernising their digital platform and consolidating siloed systems, the client reduced operational costs, accelerated time-to-market, and eliminated the technical debt of maintaining outdated infrastructure. The dramatically improved site performance and AI-powered search experience enhanced customer satisfaction, reduced helpdesk volumes, and made it easier for users to access relevant, personalised content.

For internal teams, the familiar editing environment combined with modern DevOps practices simplified day-to-day operations, boosted efficiency, and freed resources to focus on higher value initiatives. The advanced personalisation and experimentation tools gave marketing teams the ability to tailor content, optimise campaigns in real time, and increase conversion rates, while unified analytics provided deep, actionable insights into customer journeys and digital behaviours across all channels.

This project has delivered a future ready, scalable digital platform that positioned the client to better engage customers, improve acquisition and retention, and confidently evolve their digital strategy in a competitive, fast moving market.