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Case study
Media and Entertainment case study

Kantar transforms its digital user experiences to unlock new business value

Cognizant leads a multifaceted, user-centered transformation for the global brand consultancy, revamping digital touchpoints to deliver improved employee and visitor experiences.

At a glance

Industry
Media and Entertainment

Location
United Kingdom

Challenge
Modernize customer and employee-facing digital touchpoints to improve brand positioning, boost customer and employee engagement, and unlock cost savings. 

Success highlights

  • Three major digital user experience initiatives delivered on time and on budget
  • Improved end-user digital experience for website visitors in 90 country markets
  • 20,000 employees benefit from revamped digital employee services hub

The challenge

Consumer-facing companies must ground their marketing strategy in reliable data and deep insights into customer behavior. Kantar is the world’s largest AI-native marketing data and analytics business, helping their clients in 90 countries make the right branding and marketing decisions.

The company operates across multiple divisions. Kantar Insights turns raw market data into strategic advice. Kantar Profiles helps clients understand their buyers in depth. Worldpanel and Numerator extract data and insights from large-scale shopper surveys and shopper behavior data, and Kantar Marketplace provides online access to tailored insights from worldwide consumer data.

Behind them all is Kantar Group, which provides company-wide services that support each division to operate efficiently—from technology infrastructure and applications to HR and Finance. 

Digital user experiences in need of modernization

Kantar knows that as an AI- and data-driven consultancy, it must “walk the talk” with its own brand. That means using data and insights of its own to deliver experiences that generate excitement, trust, revenue and loyalty.

However, it was let down by a digital presence that had started to look and feel dated. Its flagship website was running on an old version of Sitecore that would soon be out of support, creating security risks as well as a stale and disjointed user experience. Internally, a piecemeal implementation of ServiceNow meant employees couldn’t always find the help they needed.

Kantar Group saw an opportunity to revamp its external and internal digital experiences as part of its group-wide transformation and innovation programs. It asked its long-standing partner, Cognizant, to lead the Sitecore and ServiceNow transformations, as well as a business-critical enterprise resource planning (ERP) upgrade. 

Our approach

Cognizant had worked with individual Kantar divisions for over a decade, giving us broad and deep insight into the business, its stakeholders and its systems landscape. When Kantar Group engaged us to reimagine its digital user experiences, we were able to combine that knowledge and insight with our expertise in large-scale, AI-enabled digital transformations.

Guided by a shared focus on digital experience, Cognizant delivered three closely-aligned initiatives that together transformed how Kantar engages with customers, supports employees and operates as a global business. 

Three men engaged in discussion around a table with a laptop and tablet, looking focused and collaborative in a modern office setting.
Sitecore modernization

Cognizant worked closely with Kantar to deliver a full Sitecore platform upgrade and user interface (UI) refresh. This ensured the website reflected the company’s evolving brand identity and service portfolio and delivered an intuitive and accessible user experience. Highlights included:

  • User-centered design, drawing on user research conducted with Kantar clients by an external agency. The result is an intuitive information architecture that enables rapid access to information and services, including the insights available from Kantar Marketplace. We also improved marketing workflows, enabling more visits to be turned into qualified leads.
  • Major platform upgrade, provisioning new infrastructure in Microsoft Azure PaaS, implementing the latest Sitecore version to unlock new functionality, and installing the enterprise search platform Solr to improve the search experience for Kantar.com users.
  • Full UI refresh, including component redesign to ensure brand consistency, usability and adherence to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The result is a modern, WCAG-compliant interface with an improved visual hierarchy and an engaging user experience.
  • Robust engineering practices to optimize site performance, security, scalability and maintainability. This included the introduction of modern development methods to ensure rapid delivery of high-quality future enhancements.
AI-enabled ServiceNow transformation

We worked with Kantar to redesign and rebuild the My Kantar Services portal—a digital employee services hub based on ServiceNow. Delivered in just six months, the result is a streamlined hub for IT, HR and Finance, where employees can self-serve with ease and get help from a friendly AI assistant; its key features included:

  • User research: We worked with Kantar employees to understand their goals and frustrations with the existing hub, which we used to design streamlined workflows for faster resolutions
  • Employee-centered redesign: We implemented the user-centered workflows identified in the research phase, ensuring users can more easily access information, tools and support
  • AI assistant implementation: We implemented and configured ServiceNow Virtual Assist, an AI assistant that helps employees to get answers and resolve queries without raising a ticket
Global finance ERP upgrade

Kantar relies on Maconomy from Deltek, its global ERP platform for finance. When the time came for Maconomy to be upgraded, Kantar turned again to Cognizant—not just for our ERP modernization expertise, but also for our close partnership with Deltek, which included the following features:

  • Major global upgrade: Kantar’s version of Maconomy was approaching end of support and required upgrading to ensure data security and compliance in 90 markets worldwide. The project was delivered over eight months, to time and budget, during a period of significant organizational change.
  • Rigorous testing: Testing was key to an on-time, on-budget and trouble-free upgrade. We delivered the upgrade in four waves, with rigorous testing each time—completing a total of 4,230 test cases in systems integration testing (SIT) and 7,259 in user acceptance testing (UAT).
  • Streamlined project management: Engaging Cognizant to drive this project meant Kantar didn’t have to liaise directly with multiple vendors, saving time and admin work, and reducing the risk of friction and delays.

The result was a suite of projects delivered on time and on budget—maximizing cost savings for Kantar and ensuring users benefited quickly from the revamped functionality. 

“Our partnership with Cognizant marries the benefits of Cognizant’s global reach with their deep and broad skill set. It's a long-term, ongoing relationship that is always developing, always with a shared vision around what we can achieve together.”

—Jason Scott-Taggart, Senior Director, Enterprise Digital Solutions, Kantar Group

Business outcomes

Kantar’s long-standing partnership with Cognizant has unlocked significant and incremental business value from the many projects we’ve worked on together. The Sitecore modernization, ServiceNow redesign and Maconomy upgrade alone have delivered transformative results for Kantar:

  • Increased end-user engagement: Kantar’s revamped digital presence has significantly improved the experience of visitors to Kantar.com, reflected in an increase in end-user engagement and positive customer feedback
  • Improved employee satisfaction: Employees reported higher satisfaction with the My Kantar Services portal, with key metrics including faster query resolution, more queries resolved in self-service and fewer tickets raised through ServiceNow
A diverse group of five people in an office, smiling and brainstorming around a glass board with sticky notes. The atmosphere is collaborative and creative.
A successful long-term partnership—and an agentic AI future

By partnering with Cognizant for its long-term transformation journey, Kantar has been able to unlock significant business value from its innovation and modernization initiatives. A “one-team” collaboration mindset, shared ownership of outcomes and a drive to solve problems have contributed to on-time, on-budget delivery of business-critical global projects with proven returns on investment for Kantar. Looking to the future, Kantar aims to unlock further value by deploying agentic AI to intelligently automate back-office processes, leveraging Cognizant’s expertise in full-stack AI solutions to achieve new process efficiencies and generate further cost savings.

About Kantar Group

Kantar is the world’s leading marketing data and analytics business and an indispensable brand partner to the world’s top companies. It combines the most meaningful attitudinal and behavioral data with deep expertise and advanced analytics to uncover how people think and act. Kantar helps clients understand what has happened and why and how to shape the marketing strategies that shape their future. For more information, visit www.kantar.com.  

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