Crowley Maritime Corporation provides diversified marine, transportation and logistics services in domestic and international markets through six operating lines of business: Puerto Rico/Caribbean liner services; Latin America liner services; logistics; marine contract services and petroleum distribution; petroleum services (deep sea transportation) and marine technical services. Additionally, Crowley owns three subsidiary businesses: Titan Salvage, Customized Brokers and Jensen Maritime. They pride themselves as being 118 years old, privately held and on having maintained family ownership with only three Crowley CEOs during their history.

Crowley’s core competency is working with their customers to pinpoint solutions to shipping, logistics or port operation challenges and enabling users to seamlessly move goods. The marketing of these services had traditionally been done through offline channels and finding anything about them via a search engine was uncertain, additionally Crowley’s three subsidiaries had separate and dated websites. Crowley saw an opportunity to separate from their competitors by providing their clients with alternatives for receiving service details and easier means to learn about the vast set of options they bring to the table.

Crowley decided to go on the offensive, introducing a new user experience and eZ Publish based CMS offering to draw the attention of prospects, while enabling the organization to easily create and react to the changing dynamics of their customer base. They ensured the new website had all pages optimized for search engines and built with the means to collect metrics on user activity. One of their firsts was to focus on their existing website which was 9 years old and difficult to find critical contact information. Crowley realized that just providing text-based descriptions of their services was not going to be a differentiator. They needed to compete on providing breakthrough user experience that would enable clients to find marketing content quickly and use more online tools. With this in mind, Crowley designed and built a rich and engaging user experience heavily leveraging visual assets that demonstrate the scale of the solutions they provide and made the system one where nearly all employees could participate with the website’s content.

Some highlighted eZ features and functionality include:
• Multisite management
• Search (eZFind)
• Rich interface/functionality utilizing ezJSCore
• Dynamic image resizing capabilities (scaling the images on the fly)

Since its launch in November 2010, the four new websites have already made an impact with customers across their varied service lines and subsidiaries. Crowley made this possible by not losing track of their core competences, but focusing on delivering an engaging and customer centric experience. The new technology at their disposal will fully embrace the standard stages of B2B eCommerce by allowing users to more easily find what they need, appraise their solutions and use online capabilities to get the most common services Crowley’s customers have come to expect. They went well beyond delivering the necessary functionality, they focused on delighting their customers with imagery and creating a web solution that is a joy to use.

Crowley rethought the fundamental model of getting prospects by word of mouth only and listened to their end users who demanded self service and easier ways to learn about complementary services which now can be accomplished with many business focused employees using the eZ Publish tool.

In addition, their site is multichannel. In order to make their webpages more usable, they implemented a Fluid Framework which renders the pages based on screen and device resolution, again adapting in advance of their consumers’ needs. Their site is rendered differently on a standard computer screen, tablet or smartphone.

“Aligning the site around enterprise goals was a major objective for us. We now have a site that’s more responsive to the needs of our customers. And with the increased strategic use of imagery to back up our case studies, we feel like we’re presenting our capabilities and our brand in a far more compelling way,” said Mark Miller, Director of Corporate Communications, at Crowley.