Kimball Hospitality.

Kimball Hospitality is the largest supplier of hospitality furniture in North America, with a client list that includes many of the most prominent brands in the industry, such as Marriott, Hilton, and InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG). These clients expect the best from the Kimball Hospitality team, so it’s important that their online presence reflects the superior quality and service they provide. Their parent company, Kimball International, chose BizStream to rebuild their website based on previous successful projects they’d completed for other Kimball International brands.

The challenge of Kimball Hospitality's legacy CMS

Kimball Hospitality’s previous content management system utilized a page-centric approach that emphasized simplicity over everything else. While this allowed non-technical users to update webpage content, it limited their ability to properly showcase their products and failed to demonstrate their leadership in the industry. This system also prevented them from reusing content across their website, requiring editors to manually update content in multiple locations whenever a change was needed.

To create an experience worthy of the Kimball Hospitality brand, BizStream needed to find a new method of storing their product information as well as the large number of images associated with those products. They also needed to design an architecture that could scale to meet any future requirements and offered the flexibility to integrate with internal systems and data sets. Lastly, the majority of their website traffic came from visitors on mobile devices, meaning the new website needed to deliver an excellent experience for all visitors regardless of their viewing device.

Developing a repeatable framework to scale in the future

BizStream designed a modern serverless architecture on top of Microsoft Azure in which to build the new website. This new architecture provides the flexibility to integrate with any external system and ensures they’ll be able to scale the website as the need arises. They then selected Kontent.ai to replace the page-centric CMS that had limited their ability to highlight the Kimball Hospitality products on their website.

One of the first steps to properly displaying these products was to import their existing product details and images into Kontent.ai and transform them into a structure that could be displayed throughout the website. To accomplish this, the team designed a content type within Kontent.ai that combines product details with related images and other relevant information. This allows modular content items to be created for each product and offers flexibility over how the products are displayed, including across different viewing devices.

With the content type defined and products transformed into modular content items, the team is now able to reuse each piece of content throughout their website, eliminating the error-prone task of updating information in multiple locations. Webhooks were created to trigger Azure Search to index new content items whenever they’re published, ensuring all content is searchable on the website as well. In addition to the immediate benefits to the Kimball Hospitality website, the BizStream approach to this project resulted in a repeatable framework that can be used on additional Kimball International websites in the future.

A 70% increase in monthly visitors on their new website

Since launching their new website, the Kimball Hospitality team saw a 70% increase in monthly visitors as well as an increase in the number of requests for quotes each month. The new architecture has also allowed the team to consider future opportunities to improve the customer experience, including plans to integrate with other data sets as well as their ERP system.

For their parent company, the future is bright as well, as the new framework will allow them to up-level the websites of other brands within the Kimball International group. Ultimately, their clients may be the biggest winners as they’re now better able to find the best products and services in the industry to furnish each room of their many hotel locations.