Case Study: Smart Pimcore Web Tool for Acquiring New Customers

Founded in Hamburg in 2007, Statista is now one of the world's most successful statistics databases. The platform contains over 1,000,000 statistics on more than 80,000 topics from more than 18,000 sources in around 170 different economic and industrial sectors.

Business Needs

In order to identify interesting locations as sales targets, a large DAX company approached Statista with the following order: A web tool with a map and filter functionality was to be created that uses statistical data and facilitates the acquisition of new customers by the company's field staff. Statista had previously researched the required data via various databases and made it available to the company. Until now, it was not possible to manage this data centrally or update the data sources without considerable effort.

The DAX company now urgently needed a tool with which its employees could filter and display acquisition areas according to defined criteria and on the basis of economic, infrastructural, environmental and connectivity-relevant factors. Statista commissioned the digital commerce agency Blackbit to develop this sales tool for its customer as quickly as possible.

Pimcore Solution

In order to implement the desired requirements on the sales tool quickly and cost-effectively, Blackbit used the open source Pimcore platform. Thanks to its flexible, multidimensional data model and its Content as a Service (CaaS) functionality, Pimcore can be used for any application scenario. Developers can model data structures easily and efficiently, and data can be conveniently managed and edited via the user-friendly interface. Since backend and frontend are decoupled from each other (headless CMS), the centrally and media-neutrally stored content can be made available for any output via a standardized interface. This allows more flexible use of the data and virtually unlimited freedom in frontend design.

After the desired functionality of the acquisition tool had been precisely defined in a joint workshop with Statista and the data structure and format had been determined, Blackbit created a conceptual design and a wireframe and agreed them with the customer. The agency then programmed the backend including the interface to the Statista database and designed the frontend according to CI specifications.

Business Results

With the sales tool developed on the basis of Pimcore, sales representatives can now centrally access and administer all relevant data. Current data can be conveniently imported into the web tool in Excel or CSV format. A highlight of the acquisition tool is the interactive map (based on Google Maps), which allows an intuitive regional search and the identification of interesting sales areas and potential new customers. In order to quickly ensure a good overview even with large amounts of data, the tool offers useful filter options and the possibility of saving frequently needed filter settings. In addition, scoring can be assigned for data records and search results. Filtered results can be exported as an Excel list.

Pimcore's proven rights and role management is also used in the web tool: the DAX company can manually create users or import employee lists and assign the desired access and usage rights. If an account is no longer needed, it can be deactivated at any time.