Named the most innovative company in the dental industry worldwide for 10 consecutive years, 3M Oral Care focuses on the development of dental and orthodontic solutions that simplify procedures. They also remain a proven leader in the orthodontic industry and aesthetic solutions, a position they have defended for over 60 years. Their products and supplies assist professionals in the industry to improve patient oral health and lifelong well-being.

With a scientific approach to product development, 3M Oral Care leads the way with the creation of high quality, advanced products and—with the recent upgrade in their virtual experience—they are well on their way to exceeding group company goals of expanding relevance to customers and continually investing in innovation. The company took an all-in approach to deliver an improved customer experience.

With the upgrade to their site, 3M Oral Care paid careful attention to trends and innovations emerging within the oral health sector. One significant development in customer behavior has been the trend to online research and significant growth in B2B eCommerce environments.

With more customers exploring their options through online research, prior to making decisions, healthcare practitioners are experiencing increased pressure to provide the latest in innovations and solutions to their clients.

The emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated this situation, placing more focus on eCommerce and online solutions within the oral healthcare sector. A situation that was aggravated by the inability of sales teams to call on and advise clients as they had in previous years.

3M Oral Care thus realized the importance of leveraging its innovations and developments to clients through the use of improved remote support, thereby facilitating the ability to continually showcase product brilliance.

In order to remain relevant and on the cutting-edge, 3M Oral Care, in collaboration with Zobrist, realized the need to go through a transformation of its look-and-feel and develop a new visual identity. Paying careful attention to elements such as color, typography, imagery, texture, and integration across the global organization, and with the approved style guide in mind, the process of change commenced.

The cost attributed to this migration was an important factor throughout the process, and as such Zobrist paid careful attention to methods that would curb some of the expense. One aspect was to ensure that the changes made to the current platform did not require rewriting all of the underlying code. The end result was a site still in line with corporate standards, but one reflecting a modernized look and feel.

In addition, careful attention was given to streamlining the search functionality in the shopping and corporate marketing catalogs with the aim of improving navigational and search behavior. Zobrist achieved this by re-engineering the catalog structure, defining the correct attributes, and establishing a search dictionary that contained synonyms, alias, and keywords. Once the process was completed, it was enabled to allow for automatic indexing.

While enabling the search engine provides a better customer experience, it also comes with a challenge; Zobrist needed to handle the page load time within 3 seconds. Mobiecom came to the rescue by delivering the catalog pages in ReactJS, all within the prescribed 3 seconds.

The impending end-of-service to the current site version saw the successful migration of shoportho.3m.com to HCL Commerce V8. A move, says Zobrist, that will ensure the ability to continue offering top-class innovative solutions to the oral healthcare sector.

An outstanding new feature, directly addressing the inability of sales teams to meet face-to-face with clients, is the “buy-on-behalf” feature which enables sales team members to build virtual shopping carts directly in line with the needs of their clients, thereby eliminating potential frustrations and maintaining the personal contact with the client. It has resulted in an increase in recurring business.

With the care and attention paid to developments of the new 3M Oral Care site, the company is poised for a global expansion. They can move forward comfortably with the knowledge that the refreshed site complete with state-of-the-art search functionality and additional site features will help them get there.

The entire project was delivered on time, within a six-month period. It was completed with a surplus to the budget and has received outstanding reviews from the 3M Oral Care sales team.