Delta Dental of Michigan delivers seamless digital experiences while streamlining internal processes with Magnolia

Delta Dental of Michigan business teams wanted to minimize their dependence on IT for content management. This dependence had meant that launching new websites or making changes to existing ones was often time consuming and inefficient.

Business teams often experienced long wait times for receiving IT assistance. “It might only take a few days for the IT team to actually address each content-related request from business teams. But because requests were often ad hoc, IT couldn’t plan ahead or give those requests higher priorities in their queues,” says Bommaraju. “As a result, business teams often had to wait for at least a few days before IT could get to a particular request.”

Long waits for IT assistance slowed down business growth. Business teams could not onboard new dentists or roll out new subscriber services very quickly. “That IT lead time was a killer,” says Bommaraju.

Delta Dental of Michigan adopted the Magnolia digital experience platform (DXP) to improve the speed of content delivery and the efficiency of content management. Functioning as a headless content management system (CMS), Magnolia provides business teams everything they need to create, manage, and launch digital content for Delta Dental websites.

Magnolia DXP is built for content creators. Business teams can take advantage of a unified authoring interface and WYSIWYG editing to streamline creation of engaging digital experiences. The ability to easily reuse content can save more time as teams deliver experiences across multiple sites.

Importantly, the Magnolia platform simplifies workflows that might have required IT assistance in the past. For example, Delta Dental of Michigan business teams can use Magnolia’s visual single-page app (SPA) editing capabilities to modify layouts and content in SPAs the same way they edit traditional websites. Teams can preview experiences without help from IT. Consequently, the company can take advantage of a headless architecture while enabling business teams to retain control of content.

Implementing Magnolia has given business teams greater autonomy in delivering digital experiences. “For business users, the move to Magnolia was a dream come true,” says Bommaraju. “Now they can author and publish content all on their own. They can move forward with new projects and content changes fast, without having to engage IT teams.”

By eliminating dependence on IT, Delta Dental of Michigan can speed up delivery of new experiences and content changes. “When business teams sign new contracts with various subscriber groups, they need to make things work immediately,” says Bommaraju. “Now they can do it without any IT bottlenecks.”

Delta Dental of Michigan has seen a huge improvement in turnaround times. “In the past, it might have taken IT teams weeks to address a request to spin up a new shopping portal,” says Bommaraju. “With the Magnolia DXP in place, business teams can launch these projects on their own almost instantly. It’s quite amazing.”

For the individuals and providers using Delta Dental of Michigan websites, the move to Magnolia was almost invisible: but the internal impact was huge. “We always try to deliver seamless, convenient digital experiences for our users,” says Bommaraju. “But before we implemented Magnolia, creating those experiences took quite a toll on our internal teams. With Magnolia, we’ve reduced that toll substantially. We can render the same exceptional experiences for our users much more efficiently than before.”

That efficiency helps the company move faster overall. “Previously, the company could not respond to shifting user demands or business needs very quickly,” says Bommaraju. “With Magnolia, we have much greater agility.”

Recently, Delta Dental of Michigan needed new functionality for one of its web applications. Business teams wanted to implement dynamically generated, interactive forms as part of the provider credentialing process—smoothing how they onboard new dentists to their services.

Solution architects stepped in to evaluate technical approaches to support the request. The architects wanted to ensure that any new technology would be compatible with the existing tech stack, which includes Angular as the front-end application. “We were already using Magnolia, so we decided to explore Magnolia capabilities for supporting that template-driven process,” says Bommaraju. “We worked closely with Magnolia to understand what was possible.”

After evaluating additional solutions in the marketplace, the Delta Dental of Michigan solution architects selected Magnolia. “We realized that Magnolia could solve this issue right out of the box,” says Bommaraju. “And we knew it fit well with our technical stack. We didn’t need to look any further at other products.”

The business teams can now leverage Magnolia to provide form templates to the Angular front end. With visual SPA editing, these teams can modify layout and content, and preview experiences before they are published. “The business teams were very happy with our approach to the solution,” says Bommaraju.

Looking ahead, Delta Dental of Michigan business and IT teams know they have a DXP with the flexibility for future change. “We can continue to evolve with Magnolia,” says Bommaraju. “There’s so much more to explore in the product—we aren’t even using it to its full potential yet. We look forward to tapping into additional Magnolia features and capabilities for supporting new use cases in the future.”