How Clover empowers merchants worldwide with engaging digital experiences

There’s a good chance your favorite coffee shop or yoga studio takes payments through Clover. The company is a leading point-of-sale solution for small businesses and serves merchants worldwide.

With dozens of intuitive products and partnerships, Clover simplifies the lives of business owners by making back-office management easy. From payroll to performance reviews, it helps local merchants ditch the paperwork and get back to building thriving businesses.

Why Clover’s global user base demands a local digital experience

From bakeries to large stadiums, Clover’s users are diverse in both size and industry. Although Clover operates globally, many of its products are country-specific. In order to meet the needs of its global user base, it’s critical that Clover’s website, Help Center and products deliver content for each specific geography and language.

However, Clover’s old CMS couldn’t handle its global complexity. According to Clover’s Content Design Manager Felicia Wu, “People just kept adding plug-ins to the point that the CMS system would go down multiple times a day. And when multiple people were editing the system would go down as well.”

The challenge: complex content and workflows meant serious delays

In addition to reliability, there were a number of issues with Clover’s legacy content management system:

• Poor digital experience: Clover wasn't easily able to tailor its website or help center for different countries. For instance, it was inefficient and required workarounds to feature Canadian-only products for customers in Canada, which made for a disjointed user experience.
• Heavy reliance on engineering: Copy and content were baked into code that only engineers could access. Every time the marketing or help center teams wanted to build a campaign, they had to depend on engineering resources to deploy changes across the site.
• Slow, tedious launches: A single website update often took two weeks to go live. Plus, making content variations across the site was painfully manual, requiring someone to copy and paste the same content in multiple places. The process was time consuming and error-prone.

It sometimes took weeks to deploy simple changes, and the marketing and help center teams often had to delay their campaigns. Complex workflows also cost Clover thousands of dollars in engineering overhead.

That’s when Clover started to look for a better solution. It needed a platform that could:

• Empower teams like marketing and engineering to work more effectively, streamlining workflows and increasing overall operational efficiency.
• Integrate with new and existing tools and systems, increasing return on existing investments and evolving its tech stack to be ready for future innovations.
• Unify its disparate content properties into a single, easy-to-manage hub, creating consistency across customer journeys, increasing acquisition and retention and improving customer lifetime value.
• Structure the content to use across different channels, reducing redundancy and inefficiency across teams, lowering costs and decreasing time to market.

Solution: a seamless content platform that both engineers and marketers love

Today, Clover uses Contentful as its content platform across properties to:

• Quickly localize its main marketing site to accelerate new merchant acquisition across geographies, with customized product offerings for each market.
• Improve merchant onboarding and satisfaction with rapid content updates and localization for the help site, which helps merchants understand how to use Clover devices.
• Drive merchant engagement and retention with device specific content, creating a more personalized experience through in-product and in-app messaging within its knowledge center.

Contentful’s easy-to-use platform brings stakeholders across teams together. Subject matter experts on both business and technical sides of the house all have a seat at the table. Content owners are empowered to make updates to their various digital sites without relying on engineers. Both the Help Center and marketing teams publish more content in a fraction of the time. It’s not just marketers who love Contentful’s intuitive system; Software Engineer Rachel Church adds, “As an engineer, using Contentful has been a joy. I thoroughly enjoy the API delivery of the content.”

Contentful’s sophisticated governance and user management protect the integrity of the platform. According to Tim Suh, senior product manager at Clover, “We leverage Contentful’s permissions and roles to give the right people the right access to different areas. We don’t have to worry about somebody accidentally breaking something in another area.”

Results: delivering personalized digital experiences — without the overhead

Clover built a best-for-its-business digital experience stack with Contentful’s content platform at its core. Clover’s online content is now easy to manage and update with multiple versions in multiple languages and locations deployed across channels.

The results speak for themselves:

• A tailored, localized experience increases merchant satisfaction: Clover’s Felicia Wu says it best: “With Contentful, we’re able to provide the right content to the right people at the right time and in the right place.”
• Faster campaign launches create competitive advantage in the market: No longer tethered to engineering, the marketing team saves weeks with each launch through a faster, more agile content management platform.
• Savings on operational costs and engineering resources: Thanks to automated workflows, the engineering team has been freed from doing menial tasks. Nowe they can work on more strategic initiatives, enabling the team to deliver new innovations to market quickly.

With a single content platform, Clover’s teams are aligned — working more efficiently and effectively together.

Contentful has helped unify the organization. Everybody from legal to marketing to our help writers and product managers are able to interface with Contentful and all of that reduces our time to market as well as our cost of development. — Tim Suh, product manager, Clover.