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Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Winner

Magnolia CMS

When you’re in the business of making lives easier, you have to put people first. That ethos is core to Magnolia, which first and foremost offers a fully customisable content management system (CMS) that empowers customers to build a fully bespoke platform for their digital needs.

Created in Basel circa 1997, the Magnolia CMS is a highly adaptable and lightweight system that is being used in more than 100 countries, picking up awards as it goes – including being voted in 2020 as one of the top 3 commercial CMS software products with a five-star rating by Emerce, one of the Netherlands’ leading platforms for digital marketing.

It achieves this by eschewing the traditional proprietary or monolithic models you’d get from a CMS. Instead, its customisability allows customers to walk a tightrope between a powerful, feature-rich system that’s inevitably slower to deploy and get to value , and a speedy, feature-light one.

This specificity in its offerings is what sets the company apart: rather than providing customers with a pre-packaged solution, Magnolia works with the customer to co-create a bespoke technical solution.

One of Magnolia’s clients, CNN Philippines, have also benefited from Magnolia’s light development framework, another of its game-changing features. Designed for ease of use even by novices, the clients were able to quickly adapt and redeploy their websites with just front-end technologies and a little training from Magnolia.

They also benefited from the CMS’ Stories App, a tool that empowers content creators to work with free-form content quickly, reliably and most importantly, with an unprecedented degree of freedom that allows them to focus on building exactly the story they want.

This in turn improved the flexibility of the team, allowing them to get far more done with the system in a shorter time than before. With Magnolia, a single digital producer from CNN Philippines can publish as many as ten news stories per day, a turnaround that’s far above what they had experienced before.

As a result of their switch from the old content management system, CNN Philippines saw improvements in digital KPIs across the board following project completion – as well as being empowered to make future adaptations on the fly.

“Magnolia is a success story that brings an open-source product to global-scale customers in the financial industry, media and retail. Extend it to your needs and contribute your patches.”

— Boris Hajduk, CyberSecurity, APAC, Credit Suisse

This isn’t to discount a key contributor to success: Magnolia’s comprehensive on-boarding and training procedures. More than a svelte technical solution, the company raison d’etre is about customer empowerment.

Depending on the customers’ needs, Magnolia is ready and willing to go the extra mile – whether that means developing a new integration with another application, flying down a team for last-minute training or revisiting a client long after the project has been completed, customer success is Magnolia’s success.

It’s this commitment to clients that have led to Magnolia’s success in the tech field – and why it was accorded the Customer Relationships Management (CRM) award.