Overview:
Before pointing your domain name to CIMcloud and welcoming your Workers and Customers to your new website, there are a few things you should do to set yourself up for a successful launch. At CIMcloud, we recommend a “slow rollout” as your Go Live strategy.
Given CIMclouds robust set of features, your new CIMcloud website can impact a wide audience of users, and standard operating procedures within your organization. Taking the time to carefully plan your go live strategy is critical.
Planning your strategy
Consider the different user groups impacted by your live rollout. If you are providing new features to your Workers and B2B customers, you may want to open the application up to BETA testers first, then allow others in later.
Example rollout strategy:
- Phase 1 – Subset of Workers: Invite a few of your Workers to be the first BETA users of CIMcloud. Have them try to do everything they do on a daily basis that you are moving to CIMcloud. Collect their feedback then adjust your plan if needed
Note – don’t forget to share your Worker feedback with CIMcloud!
- Phase 2 – Open up to all workers: Open access to all of your Workers. Containing the initial opening to your internal resources allows for more platform stabilization time before introducing CIMcloud to your Customers.
- Phase 3 – BETA Customers. For B2B eCommerce, its recommended to invite a select group of B2B customers to be the first to see the new website. Treat it like a “Soft Opening”. You may incentive them in some way to get more engagement in testing. Collect their feedback then adjust your plan if needed. You may want to do two rounds of BETA B2B user testing with a larger audience in round two.
Note – don’t forget to share your Worker feedback with CIMcloud!
- Phase 4 – Go Live. Point your domain to CIMcloud and celebrate your launch!
- View Launching Your Website for detailed information on the go-live step and changes required to DNS settings to point your domain to CIMcloud.
Other strategy considerations
Go live on a Subdomain, keep your current store live:
For B2B customers, and retail customers replacing a largely successful website, you can slowly roll the migration from your old website to CIMcloud to mitigate any perceived risk. Keep your current website on your live domain name and point a subdomain to CIMcloud. The benefit here is if any of your Workers or Customers are blocked by a learning curve or feature gap, they can link to your old website to submit their order. This strategy can be paired with the BETA go live strategy to get an even wider audience onto your new CIMcloud website in a BETA state.