Community West Bank
Services we provide:
- Discovery
- Strategy
- UX/UI design
- Website development
- Xperience by Kentico implementation
About Community West Bank
CWB is a large community bank in southern California with over 20+ locations and a track record of financial strength, security and stability gained over its 44 years in business. CWB has set itself apart from other banks by its people, dedication to client advocacy, exemplary "relationship banking," strong community support and a mission to exceed expectations. With a passion for providing customized solutions, the merger drove the decision to revamp their digital services to better serve their customers.
The Process
In an era where digital presence is critical to financial institutions and mergers are frequent, the successful merger of Community West Bank (CWB) and Central Valley Bank (CVB) depended on a robust and well-executed digital strategy, critical to providing a seamless user experience for customers and employees. SilverTech, leveraging its expertise in Xperience by Kentico website development, customized a digital solution that unified the brands of these two banks into one cohesive user-friendly digital experience in just 4 months from start to launch.
The Challenges
The merger of CWB and CVB presented unique challenges, particularly in integrating two distinct digital landscapes into a single cohesive website. The biggest challenges included:
- Differing Content Strategies: CWB's site was optimized for SEO with a rich content library, while CVB's site focused more on detailed product pages. Balancing these different content approaches was crucial.
- Short Timeline: The project needed to be completed with a demanding timeline, delivering a high-quality, functional website, from planning to launch in less than four months.
- Outdated Technology: The old CWB site suffered from poor mobile optimization, slow speeds, outdated information, and a lack of interactive features. This hindered customer engagement and usability.
Goals for New Site
SilverTech identified four main goals for CWB's new website with the main goal of unifying the brands. The merger of the two banks presented a unique opportunity to take advantage of the best from both brands.
Solution and Implementation
Based on the insight gained, SilverTech devised a comprehensive strategy roadmap to address the challenges and deliver a seamless digital experience for the bank merger. It was SilverTech's recommendation that Kentico's newest hybrid CMS platform Xperience by Kentico would be the best solution for the new website. Xperience with robust features and functionality allowed SilverTech to create an exceptional digital user experience efficiently for CWB.
The Key components of the solution include:
- Unified Content Strategy: SilverTech developed a content migration plan that combined the SEO-rich content from CWB with the detailed product information from CVB. This approach ensured that the new site would benefit from both banks' strengths while avoiding duplication and inconsistencies.
- Modern Design and Functionality: The new website was built with Xperience by Kentico, featuring a modern, responsive design to enhance user experience across all devices. Key features included:
- Enhanced Interactivity: Interactive elements and engaging content to improve customer interaction and retention
- Improved CTAs: Clear, strategically placed CTAs to guide users through the site effectively
- Technical Upgrades: Faster loading speeds, improved reliability, and mobile optimization to ensure a smooth user experience
- New Functionalities: Inclusion of essential tools like product comparison tools, branch locator and more
- Accelerated Development Timeline: Despite the tight timeline, SilverTech employed agile development practices to ensure timely delivery without compromising quality. The team worked in sprints to continuously test and refine the site, leading up to a successful launch within the four-month timeframe.
HIGHLIGHTS
Azure SQL Database Outage Disrupts Services in East US
4/4/24
Between 7PM ET on 03 Apr 2024 and 12:30PM ET on 04 Apr 2024, a temporary Azure outage impacted some Azure SQL Database customers.
While the exact cause and scope of the outage are still under investigation, this disruption has caused downtime for some businesses and organizations.
What We Know From Azure
According to Azure, the Azure SQL DB services were impacted. New connections to databases in the East US may have resulted in an error or timeout. Existing connections remained available to accept new requests, however if those connections were terminated and re-established, they may also have failed.
Azure automatically failed out the US East region to mitigate the impact for any resources with a failover policy. This would include any clients on a hosting tier with disaster recovery services. Upon automatically switching back into US East, some page rendering anomalies were observed, resulting in images not displaying correctly. The SilverTech team has intervened to manually resolve any issues we have encountered or were made aware of.
- Region Impacted: Widespread, potentially impacting users across the country.
- Affected Services: Azure SQL Database.
- Current Status: Microsoft states that the issues currently have been resolved.
What Is SilverTech Doing
- Our IT team has actively monitored the situation over the last 24 hours.
- SilverTech project managers are communicating information and updates that are provided to us from Azure to impacted customers individually.
- SilverTech is intervening to resolve any image rendering issues that have resulted from Azure reinstating services in East US.
- We will review the Microsoft Azure Incident Report, when available, and provide information to impacted customers.
- As of this time, SilverTech clients are not experiencing further disruptions.
Business Continuity
In order to ensure your business is not disrupted by future unplanned individual or wide-scale outages, it is important to have a disaster recovery plan with redundancy in place. Review detailed business continuity planning recommendations made in a previous blog post, what to do when your cloud provider goes down.
SilverTech IT is available to work with your IT professionals to discuss or initiate disaster recovery plans and pricing.
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