BISSELL reimagines a connected mobile experience

To foster a direct and ongoing relationship with product end-users, manage the post-purchase journey more intentionally, and engage with customers all around the world, BISSELL had the goal of improving the brand’s digital experience through a redesigned mobile application. 

Traditionally, the mobile app experience had always been a digital extension of the physical products — but BISSELL is on a journey to create a reality where both e-commerce and customer support goals can be met via the mobile app and with a 5-star brand experience. The company was looking to update its mobile tech stack, with a secondary focus on improving personalization and localization. They started out with homegrown solutions for mobile, but as a result, found it increasingly difficult to translate for different markets to engage customers most effectively. 

Another key consideration for adopting a headless technology stack was redesigning their web experience. While the immediate priority was mobile, a robust content management solution (CMS) would be able to bridge both worlds, and enable growth in both tech stacks. “Consolidation of content management was clearly a huge opportunity for us”, David Baarman, Associate Director Digital Product, said. “We knew that we could punch at a level above our weight class by having content consolidation and being able to connect the mobile and web experience.”

With this in mind, BISSELL began looking for a new CMS that would ensure the product experience was excellent on both web and mobile — and then make it simple to expand that experience internationally. 

With experience in homegrown technology, BISSELL was drawn originally to an open-source solution that the business could host themselves. However, this became prohibitive in terms of costs very quickly and caused heavy overheads in terms of network configuration. BISSELL found themselves facing a lot of challenges, including downtime, poor user experience and maintenance costs.

“We spent close to a year struggling with [the previous] solution and realized we needed an alternative”, Aaron Pittenger, Sr. Manager - IOT, said. “But because we were transitioning from a system without restrictions, our content types were on the larger side, and we found porting the content over a challenge. Then we came to Contentstack, and from the first conversation to full implementation — all content in the system and ready for mobile — it took three weeks. It was so seamless and easy, it became very difficult to say no at that point!”

The ease of a cloud-hosted system, architected and managed behind the scenes so that BISSELL could focus on the app experience itself made Contentstack the clear choice.

BISSELL went live with its new mobile app in November 2023, with all content, images, PDFs, user guides and tutorials for all relevant BISSELL products entirely driven by Contentstack. Customers can use the app to interact with connected products efficiently and alleviate the stress of maintenance needs such as purchasing parts, getting product support or checking warranties.

Behind the scenes, the content translation process has been dramatically streamlined, making it easier for BISSELL to release new features, or validate translations quickly for specific markets. In regard to quality control, the environment configuration tools allow BISSELL to test, get feedback and ensure updates are looking good with optimal efficiency, and retain full management over the content being released.

“I love how we don’t have to involve development to tweak text or add a graphic,” Baarman said. “With the headless piece of it, any business user can go in, adjust the content as they see fit, or reorder content with built-in tools. That is leaps and bounds better than what we had before.”

BISSELL now has 50 different content types and 250 content entries associated with those types. This is all localized across nine major languages and 25 markets. By consolidating the content and capabilities for both web and mobile, BISSELL is confident about the next stage — continued growth on mobile, web optimization and scale. Today, Contentstack has helped the business achieve: