TelecommunicationsClaro’s journey in creating personalized experiences for 70 million customers

• Headquarters: São Paulo, Brazil 

As Brazil’s and South America’s biggest broadband and telecommunications company, Claro needed a series of websites that could keep up with rich content experiences and heavy traffic. After using a legacy CMS with Oracle over the last decade, the brand knew it had to advance to a modern setup that could create personalized customer experiences. With Storyblok, Claro built 4 unique websites for the Brazilian market of 70 million over 3 months with just 2 weeks of onboarding.

The needs and challenges to connect with customers across Brazil

With the first big movement towards digitalization starting in 2012, Claro soon mobilized to migrate its digital platforms to more modern and intuitive ones. This included building their first websites within Oracle. Throughout the next few years, the brand realized there needed to be more connection between their publishing content and what their customers resonated with. Claro realized it was time to modernize their setup for the future. 

The main challenges that Claro faced with their previous CMS included the following: 

• Difficulty creating personalized experiences: With a need for modernized layouts, and the inability to integrate (or plugin) with the rest of their tech stack, Claro needed help to personalize content how they wanted to. 
• An all-in-one legacy stack: Their previous CMS restricted the selection of technologies Claro could use, following what was given to them rather than having a best-of-breed selection to cater to their exact business and technology needs. 
• Monolithic restrictions to API integrations: The team could not flexibly customize their preferences with React. They also couldn’t adapt their previous system to connect content hosted through components via API to their database according to each customer profile. 

Storyblok’s solutions for personalized experiences

Claro’s main goal and priority was to customize each customer’s journey based on data interactions on the Claro website, location, and purchasing behavior. This could then determine what kind of offers and packages the brand can offer on each unique website visit.

Storyblok enabled Claro to personalize their customer’s experience across all four websites for the Brazilian market through:

• The ability and agility to easily adapt components within a system to scale
• Using Storyblok’s best-of-breed capabilities to connect their database of products via API and personalize a customer’s experience based on their profile with MarTech technologies such as Salesforce Interaction Studio 
• Building components in their preferred tech stack with React
• Implementing their design system that could be easily integrated via API
• Being an easy-to-use system with a simple onboarding process of just 2 weeks 
• Enabling collaboration and workflows amongst developers, designers, and marketers to streamline content

Within 6 to 7 different use cases built using Storyblok by Claro’s development team, Storyblok stood out due to its usability and flexibility. The ease of developing and integrating with the React Design System components was a definite plus. In addition, the business team found Storyblok as an intuitive and user-friendly system for non-technical users.

Building four websites for 70 million customers

Overall, it took Claro 6 months from the start of the company’s search to the already-built 7 different use cases. This lasted from the end of 2019 till the beginning of 2020. However, Claro’s migrating progress to Storyblok was halted with the pandemic, a difficult time when all new investment projects were parked. In 2021, the project was restarted, and Claro decided to migrate to Storyblok. They could hit the ground running as they had already developed the base components in React and prepared the frontend. Once the green light was given, Claro was able to migrate in just 3 months across four websites: beOn, Claro Empresas, Embratel, and Claro.

Simplifying the adoption curve for all users

Today, teams across content marketing, website, communications, and external agencies, use Storyblok to manage over 500 pages daily. When learning to use Storyblok, all teams were onboarded in a training session with Claro’s development team, accompanied by videos and documentation to support the adoption of Storyblok. In all, it only took Claro’s communications, design operations team, and the external agency just 2 to 3 weeks to fully onboard and start using Storyblok.

The team looked for key metrics within their new setup: the difference in page loading times (reducing loading times) and Apex tests (showing the number of code errors).

In the future, Claro’s website team is set on proposing and introducing Storyblok to their other teams to implement Storyblok with their eCommerce storefront, mobile applications, and customer dashboard, Mi Claro. On top of that, Storyblok is excited to hear about the possibility of our system being proposed to Claro’s subsidiaries in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, and beyond.

One CMS, for all 

Storyblok brought new horizons to Claro through a headless experience in a time of need to personalize their customer’s experience through content. Claro’s motto (Um Claro para Um, meaning, One Claro for each One) resonates with the brand’s need for a modern platform like Storyblok that has given more agility in developing and integrating personalized content. This has connected Claro’s customer base with content that fits their needs across Brazil’s states and in future countries within LATAM.