Over the past 50 years, Purolator has grown to become one of Canada’s leading courier, freight, and logistics companies, helping businesses save time and drive results through customized shipping and supply chain solutions. Purolator picks up and delivers over one-quarter of a billion packages per year, and its website sees over nine million page views per month.
For Purolator, enhancing the digital experience for customers meant giving its customers more visibility and control in delivery options – two of the most important consumer needs, in addition to shorter delivery times. To accomplish this, Purolator needed to replace its legacy public-facing site with a scalable, accessible, responsive, and search-friendly web technology platform and content management system. Purolator’s service infrastructure relies almost entirely on web-based interactions, therefore API integrations make up a large component of its overall solution. Outages or downtime have a dramatic negative impact on overall customer experience and sales. This new site required upgraded site performance and security protections, and to deliver to consumers an improved user experience/user interface design for existing web-based integrations, including the popular “Track a Shipment” and “Locator” applications.
Purolator partnered with Northern for the implementation of their Drupal 8 open-source digital experience, backed by Acquia Cloud Edge CDN + WAF. This package meets Purolator requirements for stable global performance, continuous integration (CI), and security.
Completed in only six months, the new Purolator digital experience features a fully integrated responsive design which accommodates a bilingual, mobile-friendly experience and upgraded accessibility compliance. Northern converted design elements into reusable components, which allowed new pages to be created for rapid deployment, on brand, and with ease. The new design and site architecture were validated by Northern through user testing exercises such as card sorting and tree-testing. Today, with the integration of Purolator’s Tracker and Locator applications, the site offers immediate access to top tasks: track and trace, missed delivery, find a Purolator pick-up point, and send a package. The integration of their Resource Centre has dramatically increased the amount of information crawled and indexed, and available for users to search. The addition of SOLR / Search API as the site search tool and integration of Salesforce live chat will help Purolator further reduce traffic to call centre agents.
