How a DAM Strategy Pivot Revitalised a Manufacturing Company’s CX

CASE STUDY: Delgado Stone’s sales and marketing teams regularly received image asset requests. The ever-increasing challenge was that the team would have to immediately drop whatever task they were working on. The inefficiency was mounting, and it was getting harder to ignore…

As a manufacturer and distributor of natural stone veneer and masonry products, our digital images—and the efficiency with which we can accurately share those images —are essential to the customer experience we provide. 

Our authorised dealers include masonry and landscape businesses that sell natural stone to contractors, architects, designers, and homeowners. Those clients have countless material options available to make a natural stone installation uniquely their own, and they depend heavily on digital images to confidently navigate that selection experience. They need inspiration, and they need to see exactly what a specific material and masonry style choice will look like before making a purchase.

Getting this critical digital asset strategy right required some changes, but has proven to be a valuable CX differentiator. This is what we did and how we did it.

The Challenge

Our sales and marketing teams regularly received image asset requests from our partners, which used those digital assets for marketing materials, to sell particular jobs or for their own social media and website purposes. Our workflow included downloading these assets from Google Drive, attaching them to emails (a few at a time, of course, to meet file size limitations), and going to social media to collect and send any additional useful information, such as designer and masonry credits on completed project images.

The ever-increasing problem was that our team would immediately need to drop whatever task we were engaged with and instead prioritise supporting our partners with the assets that had been requested. Sales is, after all, often a “fastest response wins” contest. But the inefficiency was mounting and getting harder to ignore: if our sales team received 100 calls in a day, a good portion of them were requests for images. Our CEO likes to quote the statistic that it takes 23 minutes to recover from an interruption. All totaled, our teams were spending many hours a week sending out images—time that, ideally, would be better spent building relationships with our authorized dealers and network.

Our rather significant growth in the past couple of years in particular (including being in the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies) came with a corresponding escalation in our partners’ demands for image assets, further adding to the strain on our sales and marketing teams. It reached a point where our CEO looked at me in a marketing huddle and said, “This is something that we have to address, now.”

The Process

We immediately set out to explore our options when it came to a new strategy for digital asset management (DAM). After meeting with five different potential partners, we ultimately selected Image Relay because of its technical capabilities and ease of use. One of our brand promises is to provide exceptional customer service. That means delivering quick responses. In exploring new DAM strategies, we wanted to turn the digital asset experience into an opportunity—as opposed to a time-suck—by empowering our partners with immediate self-service access to all the images they need to do their jobs. Image Relay had the most straightforward platform for searching for, and finding, images on demand. 

Our new DAM strategy would enable customers to create an account, search our library to view thousands of assets, and download the images they need, all by themselves. We’ve rolled out initial access to our authorized dealers (our direct customers), who can now instantly showcase images with their end clients, without the latency of waiting for someone on our team to assemble images and information manually. For example, homeowners working with our dealers can use our platform to search “home design,” “outdoor kitchen,” or “fireplace,” and immediately view hundreds of photos to inspire their projects. Furthermore, every image on our platform is tagged by color, pattern, application, and other attributes. This makes narrowing down potential natural stone selections into a journey of discovery for customers to experience.

The Impact

Natural stone is so unique that even stone from the same quarry will have a different appearance if sourced months apart. That makes for beautiful stone, but tricky asset management (since assets can become outdated without folks aware that’s the case). With our legacy Google Drive-based customer experience, keeping assets organized and continually updated was difficult. Our new DAM strategy solves this by providing a single source of truth where partners know they are getting the most up-to-date assets. We regularly update our platform with images of the latest natural stone as it appears on the pallet, and can be certain those are the images that customers see. Seemingly small details are everything to customer experience differentiation.

We also think it’s important to highlight and showcase the teams of people who worked on the natural stone projects displayed in our image assets. Our DAM modernization now allows us to leverage image metadata: we tag every asset in our library with the mason or contractor who installed the stone, the architect or designer who designed the project, and the authorized dealer who sold the material. If our marketing team (or a customer) wants to pull an image for a social post, gone are the days of their time-consuming searches for image credits on Instagram. Let this be a lesson for more engagement through better CX: we’ve seen a clear increase in customers utilizing image assets on social media since making access to our images and data so seamless.

Image 1 Delgado Stone’s new digital content database serves as a centralized hub where users can efficiently search, share, and download photos showcasing everything from high-resolution completed project photos to photos of palletized materials.

Our new digital asset management strategy for customer experience—now providing self-serve access to image assets—is necessarily a continuous work in progress. It’s a living breathing system that requires regular updates, and which we will continually expand and make more valuable to customers. Our highest brand goal is to offer the easiest way to search for, find, and use natural stone. Just as we encourage end customers to choose natural stone for its durability, beauty, and longevity, we’re proud to offer a CX-boosting platform that has a similar combination of design and functionality.