Enhancing Juniper's CX to drive Demand Gen and B2B growth
Sensing an even more online future full of new networking needs, Juniper Networks worked with Beyond to improve their customer experience and stay competitive, starting with the web and extending to a vision for what’s ahead.
With a mission to “Power Connections. Empower Change” Juniper, the B2B networking provider, recognized the need to evolve how it provided solutions to its customers. Traditionally a hardware solutions provider, Juniper has been focused on moving to providing more scalable and flexible solutions through software, resulting in a profound review of its current customer experience.
Led by their Global Experience Director, Sarah Lesway-Ball, Juniper approached Beyond to help define its vision for CX and bring it to life across its web presence, onboarding experience and the development of new customer centric tools and resources to deliver even more value to its customers.
In the year following the initial launch of the redesigned site, Juniper measured:
Setting a guiding vision
Even with an initial focus on the website, we started by establishing an overarching CX vision anchored to Juniper’s end-to-end customer journey to inform priorities and ground the experience to be delivered. To do this, we hosted Juniper’s leaders at our hub in London to kick off a 3-week vision sprint, guided by Juniper’s broader business goals:
- move from selling individual products to integrated solutions;
- increase direct sales through the website; and
- improve the online customer experience.
During the sprint, we collaborated on everything from customers’ needs to how Juniper’s recent rebrand could be extended to work on the web. The outcome of the sprint outlined how Juniper’s brand would manifest online and charted how current and potential customers would move through juniper.net. This, in turn, highlighted priority areas for CX improvement, as well as new tools, resources, and experiences that needed to be created for the site.
The results from our work with Beyond speak for themselves. We’ve seen increased engagement, higher conversion rates and seen customer satisfaction grow. While the site redesign has driven much of this, what’s made a real difference is the introduction of new buying and sales enablement tools that’s brought more functionality to the hands of customers and prospects alike. It’s modernized our digital strategy in line with Juniper’s broader sales and growth goals.
Sarah Lesway-Ball, Global Experience Director at Juniper Networks
Starting with high-impact sections
Our first major effort was reworking how people engaged with Juniper’s, recently acquired Wired and Wireless solutions. This product family and associated pages were the perfect place to start, given they formed a core, new software offering and were often strategically important to customer deployments too.
Juniper had no shortage of explainers, product guides, and informative assets, but they weren’t organized optimally to support customers as they researched and evaluated various solutions.
We focused on improving the product discovery process primarily with filtering and comparison tools, more akin to a B2C ecommerce site. We redesigned the product pages to function as a hub experience where customers could learn everything about a particular product in one place. Our design still connected to Juniper’s sales flow, but in a way that improved connections to other parts of the site, which we tackled one by one.
Making even bigger bets
Juniper’s business initially required that the site be worked on section-by-section, without affecting global elements or the underlying information architecture. Taking this phased approach meant that we could better incorporate data into our designs, carrying forward design patterns to the next site section confident they were already working well.
Over the course of the next two and half years of partnership, we redesigned more structural parts of the site. Throughout, we used our deepening knowledge of Junipers’ customers’ needs and awareness of the business’ goals to build totally new solutions that had even greater impact. Together, we brought several new key elements to the online customer experience, including:
The Feed
Juniper’s media portal that brought together all of the company’s disparate media types, including podcasts, webinar events, educational videos, and ongoing series. The purpose of The Feed was to create engagement and encourage repeat visits, even for people who might not be actively considering a purchase.
An ROI Calculator
A tool that allowed customers to easily enter technical information about their current networking infrastructure and easily calculate the potential savings they could achieve with Juniper’s solutions relative to their current set-up.
The Solutions Builder
A single tool that allows customers to build multi-product networking solutions that address particular business challenges. The Builder represented a consolidation of an array of siloed tools scattered across the site and better allowed customers to shop for solutions versus products, alone.
Juniper never threw away any of our ideas for the site. Because we trusted each other, we always respected if they said the time wasn’t right to try something new, but they always gave us the chance to test it out when it was.
Scott Abbott, Associate Director of Experience Design at Beyond
Upleveling from the site to end-to-end CX
As our work on the site progressed, it came with an expansion of our remit — looking not just at the site alone, but revisiting — and reworking — our initial vision to shape a more complete customer experience across channels.
This involved setting up new ways of working, facilitating sessions that brought leaders from across the business together to talk about Juniper’s CX work in aggregate, instead of in terms of discrete departmental initiatives. To this group and a newly formed CX steering committee, we brought data from the site to inform next steps, and after 18 months, we were able to use what we’d learned to refocus our broader vision and, more recently, tie it to Juniper’s CX strategy for 2025 that we helped to define.
Today, we’re looking even further into the future at how Juniper can continue to lead on the basis of CX and better meet their mission of powering connections and empowering change.
Indirectly, the very hiring of Beyond shifted how Juniper thought about CX. Working with us — versus a set of agencies, each responsible for just one part of a customer’s experience — shifted the mindset of the team that worked with us in such a way that allowed their global CX team to make more meaningful change.
Ben White, Commercial Director at Beyond
