BDO Alliance USA

The Client

BDO Alliance USA is a nationwide association of independently-owned local and regional accounting, consulting and service firms with similar client service goals. By accessing the resources of BDO and each other, the Alliance presents an opportunity for these accounting and consulting, and business and technology firms to expand services to their clients — without jeopardizing their existing client relationships or their autonomy. 

The Situation

The Alliance Portal, a private Drupal-based platform, is available to members of firms who are part of the BDO Alliance USA. With a desire to become an indispensable resource to Alliance firms, BDO approached Mediacurrent to help expand its portal functionality with an eye toward increasing customer acquisition, retention and satisfaction. 

The Challenge

Over the years, BDO’s portal has evolved from a document-based Sharepoint system to a dynamic marketing tool with Drupal 8. And as the BDO Alliance Program has collected more data, the direction of the Alliance Portal has become increasingly data-driven. But a user satisfaction survey offered insights into how users thought the Alliance Portal could be improved, with site search topping the list. 

The Solution

Because the Alliance Portal’s primary function was to allow members to efficiently find assets among its 120,000 searchable data points (including services, documents, webcasts, CPE courses and more) provided by portal members, external content providers and other BDO resources, effective search was imperative. Using Acquia Solr Search, BDO improved its search engine in several ways:

• Speed: Search is highly optimized for BDO users, making it fast and easy to search for events, CPE, documents and Alliance updates.
• Depth: The Portal contains tens of thousands of searchable documents. Users can also search for members by experience in a specific industry, product and/or service. Additionally, users now can continue the same search on the main website, BDO.com.
• Predictions and suggestions: The redesigned search function offers taxonomy-based autocomplete and suggestions. 
• Learning opportunities: Users can search over 7,500 CPE courses and sessions needed to build their professional knowledge base and fulfill licensing requirements.

Before the update, there was no central place for users to submit help requests. Mediacurrent created a Help Center to provide users with a one-stop-shop for help while streamlining workflow for BDO staff. The new implementation provided a Help Desk page on the portal, greatly improving access to important technical desks and other help materials, as well as categorized FAQs. And the Help Desk’s integration with SugarCRM allows for submission tracking and ticket response. 

The Results

Acquia Cloud Platform was able to provide a powerful, flexible infrastructure with the stringent security controls BDO needed to protect sensitive information. Acquia provides the capacity needed to handle 25,000 users with the ability to scale up in the future. And with a reliable system in place, BDO ensures confidence in the Alliance program, mitigates potential loss of revenue and protects employee productivity.