Athene Website Consolidation

In 2015, the Athene companies had seven different public websites, with another in development. In addition, there were five secured portals for producer and customer access. Sites were hosted on different platforms and maintained by different teams. For site visitors, the differences created confusion and misunderstanding.

Our team was challenged to consolidate four websites into one experience in four months, and move that experience to a new domain:

• Athene.com

• Atheneannuity.com

• Athenelifeny.com

• PresidentialLife.com

At the time Athene.com was our primary retail website. The other three sites were for companies that Athene had acquired in the past, that needed to be retired. The parent company, Athene Holding, would take over the Athene.com domain name.

Domain Question

Our first challenge was to determine whether all sites could be hosted within one shared domain — Athene.com. This would have been ideal, but we ultimately decided to use a separate domain for the retail website at Atheneannuity.com. It would be very difficult to have content built in two different content management systems be delivered in a seamless user experience. Due to the corporate structure and legal requirements, we were not able to use one content system.

Content Rationalization

I took stock of all the existing content on the four websites and compiled it into a content audit spreadsheet. It turned out that we had a lot of redundant content, which was easily reconciled. However, there were going to be some very challenging pages. The Contact Us page, and the Service Forms page would have to include information for a multitude of legacy companies, whose business was being serviced by different Third Party Administrators (TPAS). All of the legacy forms would have to be moved into the same database, and we would have to come up with a way to display the correct forms and service information to each user.

I compiled all the different service groups into a spreadsheet and drafted a "forms logic" matrix to show how we would need to have the user answer a series of questions before showing them the correct forms and mailing address. Another team member worked with partners in Operations to confirm that the information was correct. We were also able to get them to agree that we could display one toll-free number for customers to call.