3Shape Scales Content Workflows to Improve Their Customer Experience

Challenges

With over a third of their 1,700 employees dedicated to developing new technology that continually enhances their products, transformation is core to 3Shape’s culture. And as this innovation fueled rapid growth across product lines and customer segments, the 3Shape marketing department struggled to keep pace.

Resellers, distributors, service partners, and other customers in over 100 countries relied on the product information and training materials produced by the 3Shape marketing team. Continual product launches and updates made it challenging to provide all of these stakeholders with the content they needed.

Vladimir Chen, a former senior digital product manager at 3Shape, shared, “We used too many channels to share digital assets. And this would mean, unfortunately, redundant work, poor customer service, and generally longer time to market.” They needed a centralized tool to control their global content distribution. “We wanted a single source of truth for our partners, but also for internal users,” he said.

3Shape began searching for a digital asset management (DAM) solution to serve as a central location for asset storage and distribution, and in 2017, they implemented the Collective.

Objectives

Centralized storage
Provide a single repository for the most up-to-date and brand-approved content.

Streamline workflows
Coordinate efforts across distribution channels to eliminate redundancies and speed up time to market.

Easy access
Give users secure, self-service access to the content they need, whenever they need it.

Evolve with time
Position the system for growth in tandem with organizational change.

Solution

Tackling one challenge at a time
Confusion around where files were stored, how they were organized, and which versions were current made the prospect of migrating everything to a new DAM system very overwhelming. Vladimir said his team rose to the challenge by taking on one task at a time, knowing their system would continually evolve. “It’s very important to start small. Start with what you have,” he shared. In developing a metadata taxonomy, Vladimir said they began by simply asking, “What do we know?”

He also appreciated the templates Widen provided to guide them through the implementation process. “The Widen team held us by our hands, to ensure a smooth, step-by-step onboarding process.”

Integration with other platforms
Integrations between the Collective and other software in their martech stack allows 3Shape to share assets across platforms, seamlessly. When files are added or updated in the DAM system, they automatically sync across other software and channels, including their Partner Portal — which is connected via the Widen API. This ensures that customers have access to current content, and eliminates significant workflow redundancies and inefficiencies.

Benefits

Scalability 
Integrating the Collective with other software gives 3Shape the ability to scale the system to meet expanding content and workflow demands. “We basically decided from early on to integrate Widen with our integration players to use or share assets through those channels — which will allow us to really scale.” Vladimir shared. And he’s interested in continuing to add integrations, including one for the Adobe Suite and another for metadata automation. New opportunities like this will help ensure that the Collective is positioned to support their current and future operational goals.

Improved customer service
With each new product launch there are a variety of materials to distribute to 3Shape stakeholders — everything from marketing and training materials to product documentation and demo cases. The Collective has become the single, centralized repository for all of this content. Not only do their customers know where to find it, they can do so in minutes and are confident that it’s up-to-date and on-brand. A survey to 3Shape DAM users that download files revealed that a whopping 90% of respondents found what they were looking for. This translates to operational efficiency and happy customers.

“We basically decided from early on that we wanted to build our ecosystem for digital asset management — or digital assets — so we would integrate our Widen Collective with our integration players and therefore will be able to use or share assets through those integration channels which will allow us to really scale.”

Vladimir Chen, Senior Digital Product Manager at 3Shape