[November 20, 2014]

KONE Transforms Online Customer Experiences with SDL

SDL (LSE: SDL) today announced that KONE, a global leader in the elevator and escalator industry, has streamlined its localization processes and has optimized its website for mobile delivery and faster site performance with SDL Customer Experience Cloud (CXC).

In addition to its corporate site, KONE runs over 50 regional websites in more than 30 languages around the world. While the site structure is the same across regions, the content can differ based on local market products and requirements. With over 100 content contributors and rapidly changing copy, KONE was not able to quickly post or update information about its products and services, diminishing user experience and preventing new leads.

A complicated system of multiple content libraries could no longer support the company's ambitious web content goals and there was a delay in uploading localized content to the regional sites. To streamline its processes, meet local needs and transform the online customer experience, KONE selected SDL, which came recommended by HintTech, an enterprise digital agency and a long-standing SDL partner. Leveraging SDL's solutions, KONE looked to improve overall online experiences for web visitors by moving all of its country sites to local domains, optimizing them for mobile devices and ensuring fast delivery of consistent and relevant content in local languages.

"With SDL's solution, we are now able to quickly deliver up-to-date content localized to the visitor's market and are attracting more qualified prospects and customers to all of our sites globally," said Kari Leppänen, owner of Online Marketing & Communications Solutions at KONE. "As a result of our work with SDL, we have increased our onsite conversion by almost 20 percent within the first three months of go-live and we have seen a site performance improvement of 400 percent. We now have a solid platform that supports our current site and localization needs, wich can scale with us as we expand."

Through this collaboration, KONE deployed several components of SDL's CXC - SDL Tridion for web content management and SDL WorldServer for automation and management of the localization process. Within 12 months, all regional sites had been migrated to SDL Tridion, with local domains established for every region. SDL WorldServer now runs smoothly on the backend, ensuring efficient translation processes and enabling cross sharing of existing translations and terminology. KONE opted to host its entire content management platform on the Microsoft (News - Alert) Azure cloud, allowing them to scale up or down as needed and become less reliant on internal IT policies.

Today, approximately 100 people within KONE's marketing, communications and global development groups use SDL's web and language technologies. With a simple-to-use centralized system, a streamlined process for content localization and the ability to easily reuse content, KONE can consistently and rapidly feature the latest product information in the correct language on its sites. KONE can achieve all this without manual copying, pasting and coding, freeing its employees to focus on more strategic activities.

"Localizing and updating web content is often an arduous task for regional marketing teams," said Mark Lancaster, CEO and Founder, SDL. "Not only do inefficient processes for dealing with global content take up precious time and resources - and therefore costs - for organizations, but they also negatively impact the online user experience. We're delighted that KONE has made customer experience a top priority and that we were able to assist the company in optimizing its internal processes and shorten their time-to-market."

Looking ahead, KONE plans to develop additional websites as it enters new markets, particularly to address growth opportunities in emerging markets such as those in Asia. Regardless of its next move, KONE knows it can realize its customer experience goals on time and on budget, supported by SDL's technology and integration with industry-leading partners.

To learn more, please visit our blog as well as the KONE case study and video page.

About KONE
KONE is one of the global leaders in the elevator and escalator industry. KONE's objective is to offer the best People Flow® experience by developing and delivering solutions that enable people to move smoothly, safely, comfortably and without waiting in buildings in an increasingly urbanizing environment. KONE provides industry-leading elevators, escalators, automatic building doors and integrated solutions to enhance the People Flow in and between buildings. KONE's services cover the entire lifetime of a building, from the design phase to maintenance, repairs and modernization solutions. In 2013, KONE had annual net sales of EUR 6.9 billion, and at the end of the year over 43,000 employees. KONE class B shares are listed on the NASDAQ OMX Helsinki Ltd in Finland. www.kone.com

About SDL
SDL (LSE: SDL) allows companies to optimize their customers' experience across the entire buyer journey. Through its web content management, analytics, social intelligence, campaign management and translation services, SDL helps organizations leverage data-driven insights to understand what their customers want, orchestrate relevant content and communications, and deliver engaging and contextual experiences across languages, cultures, channels and devices.

SDL has over 1,500 enterprise customers, over 400 partners and a global infrastructure of 70 offices in 38 countries. We also work with 79 of the top 100 brands. For more information, please visit www.sdl.com.

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