Sym-Tech

Financial

In Partnership With

Client Background

About the client

Sym-Tech understands the challenges that automobile dealerships face in their financial and insurance (F&I) departments. Along with providing high-quality products that end-consumers desire, the key to their success lies in the training of their dealership clients. Add in their custom davePlus® software and Sym-Tech can quickly streamline the operations of dealership’s financial operations.

Over 50 years in the automotive industry
Best-in-industry training and support equips dealers with the skills to increase F&I performance
More than 200 associates support over 1,200 new car dealers across Canada
Part of the Amynta Group of companies that manage over $3.5B in premiums

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Where We Started

The challenge

Leaf Design teamed up with their partners at Universus Media to work towards developing a new website for Sym-Tech. A leading in the automotive warranty and financial space, Sym-Tech’s website had a disorganized information architecture that was difficult for visitors to navigate.

Additionally, their original website’s platform lead to significant usability issues. Page load times were extremely slow, causing visitors to wait for significant delays – and in some cases – abandon the site.

From a back-end perspective, the platform was difficult to update with new content, leaving the site’s information woefully out of date.

A dated visual design that lacked cohesion with their refreshed brand guidelines
Content was not properly focused on key audience pain points
A weak user experience for mobile visitors
Poorly optimized SEO titles and meta descriptions
Extremely slow load time for many key pages
A back-end system that prevented easy access to content updates

How We Collaborated

Design process

1. Original website

The previous Sym-Tech website had a disjointed feel and struggled to render at very large screen sizes as well as on mobile devices.

2. Project blueprint

After reviewing all of Sym-Tech’s requirements, we documented the best path forward to achieve each of their objectives.

3. Initial concept

A great first attempt, the initial design concept did not provide an impactful enough banner area. Additionally, several sections needed to be kept off the site for legal reasons.

4. Final design

The revised banner captured much more attention with its bold colours and animated background video. A customer guarantee was added to reinforce Sym-Tech’s commitment to their value.

The Results

Our solution

A fresher design

As part of the design brief, our goal was to provide a more vibrant and visually exciting website than the current site that felt overly “flat”. Included in this process was the requirement to ensure that the client’s new brand guidelines document were followed for consistency. On-page design elements were created to add some vibrancy to the website and avoid the overly corporate feel of the previous design. Where appropriate, small animations were added to design elements to help make the pages come alive.

Content re-organization

One of the most important tasks that this project involved was to re-structure the company’s product and service content so that visitors could quickly identify if they were in the right place. This started with ensuring that all content within the site was B2B-focused and spoke directly to automotive OEMs and dealerships. Content was broken up into their 4 main pillars of business: Cosmetic, Mechanical & Safety, Anti-Theft, and Financial.

Along with the content re-structuring, a significant amount of new content was incorporated. Along with new copywriting, product videos, illustrations, and brochures were produced to better explain the benefits and advantages that Sym-Tech had to offer.

And as a Canada-wide business, all of the site’s pages were built to be multilingual in both English and French languages. An easy to use language selector was made accessible at the top of every page.

Performance improvements

A significant issue with the previous website was extremely slow page load times. The new website made significant improvements in this metric through the use of a variety of site optimization techniques. Images and video were compressed and loaded only an as-needed basis, HTML and related code were minified, and mobile-optimized images were served to tablet and phone users.