SYZYGY Warsaw

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m the Head of Marketing Department at Danwood. Our company is one of the leading producers of modern prefabricated houses in Europe. We operate mostly on the German market, which comprises 90% of our sales, but also in Switzerland, Austria, Great Britain, and Poland.

We employ around 2300 people – technical staff, architects, builders, construction crews and other contractors. Over the past 25 years we have completed over 13000 projects all over Europe.

I joined the team in 2017 and oversaw, among other things, the overhaul and expansion of our digital presence. Our goal was to raise the profile of various Danwood brands on the European market.

For what projects/services did your company hire this vendor?

Our company understood that changes happening around the world and the dynamic growth of digitization will inevitably require us to develop and expand our online channels. We wanted to give our online presence a new feel that would set us apart from our competition.

At first, our collaboration was focused on making technological and visual changes to just one product website – that of our main brand. We wanted it to be more intuitive and user-friendly, and for it to look great on mobile devices. We were also intent on performing a complete overhaul of its design in order to give it a modern edge.
However, our collaboration with SYZYGY turned out to be so satisfying that they ended up also creating a slew of new online products for us: an image website, a website for our premium housing brand, a VR sales tool, and a CMS for our sales department. We are also currently working on creating an online configuration manager.

What were your goals for this project?

Our main goal was to revitalize the product website for Danwood – our main brand – so that it would be able to meet the demands of several markets (German, Austrian, Swiss, British, and Polish) at once, and to create completely new websites (both product- and image-oriented) and sales solutions for our other brands, which are still under development.

The changes involved both new technological solutions and creating a new, attractive design for the websites.

Our biggest challenge was coming up with a way to sell a new brand of intelligent and highly exclusive houses using digital tools. Premium products are a different breed – when a customer invests a significant amount of money, they want to see the product in order to make sure that it’s the right fit for them.

The construction industry has long been faced with the challenge of making it possible for the client to experience the house they envisioned even before it is built. We can proudly say that thanks to our collaboration with SYZYGY, our company has managed to find a solution to this problem.

How did you select this vendor?

We learned about SYZYGY from an Internet report which included a ranking of the best web development companies. I sent out an inquiry/brief to several companies that made a good impression on me, and whose scope seemed to fit our needs.

In our opinion, SYZYGY came up with the best offer – even though it was not the most economical one. The deciding factor in this case was definitely the quality of the proposed solution (the graphic design and proposed technological solutions that allowed for further optimization down the line), their approach to the project, and their enthusiasm.

Describe the project in detail.

As I mentioned at the beginning, SYZYGY Warsaw has already supplied us with 6 different digital products, each of them had a different scope, aim, nature, and addressed a different need, which makes it difficult to describe them all in detail.

For us, the most important and most inventive project was the one related to the Danwood Vision brand, which involved a comprehensive solution: creating and implementing a visually stunning premium house service, designing the entire visual identification and branding, and above all creating an innovative tool based on VR technology and aimed at increasing sales.

This tool, which consists of goggles and custom-made software, not only allowed the customer to take a virtual walk through every room of the house, and to personalize its interior design, but also eliminated an earlier problem related to the oftentimes long distance the customer would have to travel to take a look at the model home.

What was the team composition?

I was in contact with various people, depending on the project, but there were always at least two of them. I was in daily contact with 2 POs with whom I covered all day to day issues. However, from time to time, other employees specializing in a given area would also get involved.

The workshops proposed by SYZYGY at the beginning of our collaboration were very helpful, as they allowed us all to meet each other, and SYZYGY got a chance to thoroughly familiarize themselves with our business.

With every new digital product, SYZYGY organizes a kick-off, which is a series of meetings devoted to addressing key issues.

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact this project/engagement has had on your business?

Our collaboration with SYZYGY Warsaw has had a big impact on our operations, particularly in terms of our Vision brand. Thanks to the VR tool, we have managed to significantly improve our business model, reach our clients even more efficiently, and really address their needs. Additionally, we have made a successful debut on the premium segment of the prefabricated house market.

This was also reflected in our sales.

How effective is your workflow between your team and theirs? Did you use any specific project management tools?

Workflow wasn’t a problem for us – daily status updates, sharing information, and notifications about any potential changes are the norm. Each product is managed in Jira, so we can stay up to date on the progress, and also circle back to individual tasks and their history, which often yields valuable insights. Both teams find this method of collaboration satisfactory, as it gives us a sense of security.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The thing we value most in our collaboration with SYZYGY is their proactive attitude and the fact that they continually show initiative in terms of improving current solutions, proposing efficient tools, optimizing processes, and encouraging us to innovate.

They do not limit themselves to implementing our suggestions, but always try to find and offer some added value. This approach gives us a sense that we are working not with a sub-contractor, but with a real partner.

Are there any areas for improvement?

It’s hard for me to point out any area that could be improved. We are very happy both with the collaboration itself, and with the solutions we were able to create together.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the head of e-commerce for a tourism company.

What challenge were you trying to address with SYZYGY Warsaw?

We were looking for frontend developers that worked in an agile methodology.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They helped build the frontend of our e-commerce website. They built a fully responsive web design. They transitioned us from Angular to React and worked collaboratively with our third-party backend development team.

What is the team composition?

We worked with two developers.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent $500,000–$1 million.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in 2014, and our engagement is ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We worked in agile and scrum methodology. They collaborated well with our team and the third-party backend team. We have seen an improvement in online sales since working with them.

How did SYZYGY Warsaw perform from a project management standpoint?

They meet deadlines without a problem. We use Jira for project documentation and Slack for communication. We have monthly meetings at the end of sprints.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They bring useful technology to the project. My team has good relations with their team, and I have good relations with them on the business side of things.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the head of customer experience at Kyocera Document Solutions. We’re a large corporation focused on everything related to document management. The company is predominantly known for its office hardware, such as printers and multifunctional devices.

We’re headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and our office is responsible for the EMEA region. Currently, we’re going through a digital transformation, and our focus now is to invest in software around document management. This is in order to help businesses perform better in the digital space.

I manage the customer experience center, which is responsible for various marketing activities centrally developed by the company. But it’s also responsible for supporting our customers locally. My team and I are responsible for the brand, content, communication campaigns, our customer-facing website, and skills enablement.

What challenge were you trying to address with SYZYGY Warsaw?

I arrived at the company 3–4 years ago with a team of people coming from different industries. We were brought in by the top management to drive certain changes that the company couldn’t do before. In fact, they were changes the whole industry hadn’t done it before.

We were still reliant on the business of the past, with a lot of focus on hardware. The company wanted to take a new direction to the area of enterprise software document management, and they needed a team to support that. I was part of that team, initially looking after big data and branding.

The biggest challenge here — not only for us but for all the players in the industry — is that things hadn’t moved much since the world had shifted to the digital space. We were working with some legacy technology and the worldview had changed. Essentially, we needed to adapt to the new way of working and the new customer requirements. This resulted in a couple of major initiatives. One of those was the project we did with SYZYGY Warsaw.

What was the scope of their involvement?

SYZYGY Warsaw developed our new website and performed a complete revolution of our web content management. They also looked for issues with our brand, which had an outdated image. Also, we weren’t so proud when it came to managing our customers and customer database, so we needed to move into a new CRM.

Our team also worked with them on the implementation of Salesforce. There were a lot of things to be done, and we felt we were working as a startup on many occasions, because of how much had to be renewed.

The website was built using Adobe’s AEM. It’s a relatively static platform, with not much flexibility. We were very decentralized, with microsites all over the place, which didn’t help us create harmonious use or present ourselves as one brand, neither from a European nor a global perspective.

What is the team composition?

It has varied. I’ve had a lot of contact with Matt (Director of Design & Build), who’s located in their UK office. However, we had contact with different people during the initial discovery phase of the project when we looked at the design, user journeys, and branding. I’ve had a lot of contact with people at their Poland office, including a project manager and am also in contact with a project manager in Greece.

How did you come to work with SYZYGY Warsaw?

We had an extensive process of putting requirements together and figuring out what we’d like to complete and how. We went through an agency discovery process and had a couple of agencies do pitches on our requirements. In the end, we found that SYZYGY Warsaw made the best offer.

They made a good impression, were very professional with the project description, and understood our issues and what we wanted to accomplish. There were more factors around that decision, including the perceived ROI, and SYZYGY Warsaw felt right for us from the moment we met them.

How much have you invested with them?

The total cost has been between €2.5 million–€3 million (approximately $2.7 million–$3.3 million USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

It’s been a long, ongoing project. Our team first contacted them in 2017, and there was a 9–12–month period from presenting the brief to signing the contract. We’ve had a long process with different stakeholders involved.

Fortunately, we’re in the final stages now, but we’re not done yet. Our team is implementing the website in different countries, with launches every month. We’re looking at July 2020 as possibly the last month of implementation and rollout in all our countries.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We’ve had a very challenging project dealing with many different local countries. In fact, our team has had a lot of freedom to do whatever they wanted with the website. Even though we were working on one platform, different versions were independent of one another.

Now, we want to introduce a completely different approach. SYZYGY Warsaw made a full commitment to being with us. This includes participating in discussions with different countries, collecting requirements from them, and helping us prioritize the requirements we had across different branches and countries.

We’ve gone through many, many requirements and debated between different countries about those requirements. SYZYGY Warsaw helped us a lot with those and was flexible with the scope of the work that was agreed upon in the contract. That’s something that I appreciate. At any moment we had an issue that needed to be immediately fixed, they resolved it and wouldn’t say that it wasn’t in the scope, that we’d have to prepare a proposal, and so on.

In many cases, they helped us properly manage requirements from our sales organizations. Some things didn’t work well at the start, which was related to us not having a large budget to deploy this kind of project, but we managed it properly and are continuing to manage things very well. We’ve just gone live with our most important country. There was a successful launch of the Kyocera website in Germany, and so far, so good.

How did SYZYGY Warsaw perform from a project management standpoint?

Communication has gone very well. Not all deadlines were met, but that relates to the complexity of the project. The website has two parts: an open environment and a closed environment where people need logins with specific identifications for different parts and different content of the site.

This was something that we all underestimated. In some cases, things didn’t work out well and took longer than expected. SYZYGY Warsaw mentioned that to us so we were aware that we had a very challenging timeline with risks connected to it. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

It’s the collaboration. We worked across different locations, but it felt as though we were in a single room. When it comes to making websites live, there are different stakeholders involved, and SYZYGY Warsaw is always willing to collaborate.

They're very responsive in taking our concerns and complaints from different organizations and top management as well as always willing to help. Obviously, there’s a contract and we’re paying them for a certain amount of work, but they’re able to look beyond that. That’s something I appreciate.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, not really. I’m not technical enough to understand how deadlines could be estimated better and that’s also related to the complexity and legacy of the website. If I had something to mention though, I’d mention it. I don’t know how this could be achieved. Maybe they could spend more time investigating the legacy platform in efforts to make better time estimates.

It’s something we started in 2017, so I don’t know how much more time we could spend. It’s not a complaint at all. I’m very happy with SYZYGY Warsaw. I wouldn’t have picked another agency had I known what I know now.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

It’s always the same when it comes to working with external agencies. Clients should make sure they have their expectations set from the beginning and that they’re clear on what they expect in terms of output.