CORSAIR Delivers Immersive CX With Cloudinary

ABOUT

Powering Gamers to Shine at Every Level

When it comes to high-performance products for gamers, streamers, content creators, and gaming PC builders, CORSAIR is the best-known name on the leaderboard. Founded in 1994, the company has grown to become a leading global provider and innovator of everything from gaming components to premium streaming equipment to Esports coaching services.

CORSAIR also provides all the gear and furniture to design the perfect gaming environment, including smart ambient lighting, desks, and chairs. Under its own name and brands like Drop, Elgato, Fanatec, Origin, and SCUF, the company serves everyone from casual gamers to committed professionals. The mission is always to help its customers perform at their very best, reflecting its inclusive slogan, “Everyone’s a gamer — and everyone deserves their chance to shine.”

THE CHALLENGE

Balancing Ops and UX Demands

CORSAIR’s outdated tech stack had been running sluggishly, requiring considerable manual intervention. Its FTP-based media management system was forcing users into endless folder hunts to find the images they needed. The inability to do basic things like visual media browsing and previewing led to inefficiency and frustration.

Day-to-day management was tough enough, but when CORSAIR wanted to modernize, the challenges became insurmountable. CORSAIR’s prior system stalled its efforts to adapt to modern file formats — such as WebM — to deliver the smallest file types at the highest quality to every channel.

CORSAIR sought a more flexible, user-friendly image and video platform that would play nicely with its new headless tech stack, which included the Contentful CMS and Shopify e-commerce platform.

Of course, any new system’s benefits would need to improve operational efficiencies and boost commercial ROI. CORSAIR needed its new system to delight and engage its millions of global customers through high-impact visual experiences. Not only to help steer customers to the right mix of products, but also avoid costly, inconvenient and wasteful returns.

This is critical as setting up an optimal gaming environment involves a range of highly technical products, in different categories, each with detailed specifications. That’s why visitors spend considerable time on CORSAIR’s site doing intensive research, expecting detailed product information to be served up fast.

User experience was so critical that CORSAIR needed to ensure its top expert in this area, Steve Doll, CORSAIR’s Director of Web Marketing and UX/UI, was fully bought into the new system.

THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION

Next-Level Visual Media Management

Corsair selected Cloudinary during proof-of-concept evaluations of several integrable headless solutions including Contentful and Shopify, for its wider replatforming effort. And like new ammo in an online Deathmatch, Cloudinary gave CORSAIR new power to up its visual media game.

For the creative and product teams, Cloudinary Assets eliminates major visual media workflow bottlenecks in working with CORSAIR’s massive back catalog. Its new visual, user-friendly UI makes it fast and easy to browse, search, and preview media assets. Cloudinary’s URL transformations let team members programmatically resize, crop, compress, and serve up images at scale.

Doll explains, “When you’re working at the scale we do, you really have to be flexible without having to re-upload images in different formats and change your code. Cloudinary gives us a lot of shortcuts when we’re working in such a huge volume.”

A real game-changer, however, was the opportunity to be first to pilot Cloudinary 3D. This new platform automatically converts 3D models into photorealistic, immersive visuals with limitless variations. More than any other type of buyer, gamers expect and are inspired by visual experiences that educate, inform, and entertain.

CORSAIR is banking on 3D’s potential to drive up customer engagement and conversions across multiple channels, explains Doll: “We sell directly through our website in most regions, but many customers also buy on Amazon, Best Buy, or in a physical store, so we need visual storytelling to impact all these. The more we can help people feel confident experiencing our products virtually before they buy increases our sales overall.”

THE RESULTS

CORSAIR Custom Labs Gets the ‘UX Factor’

Cloudinary transformations proved to be, quite literally, transformational. Now building a product page with Cloudinary and Contentful takes just a few hours instead of the days or weeks it took before CORSAIR’s transitioned to headless architecture.

“It’s almost magical that just by putting some parameters in the URL you can get a different version of the image,” Doll enthuses. “It’s so quick, you don’t have to wait for it to be generated on the backend — pretty much as soon as you put something into the URL and hit ‘Enter,’ it loads that version of the image. That’s so huge for us.”

The real “UX factor,” however, shines through in the way CORSAIR is using Cloudinary to build immersive experiences. In the award-winning CORSAIR Custom Lab, customers use 3D visuals to design their own unique gaming setups using the full gamut of CORSAIR’s products and components.

The first test with Cloudinary 3D will let customers with mobile AR experience the latest version of the CORSAIR ONE gaming PC, allowing them to project a 3D image of it onto their own desks so they can get a feel for its true size and how it will look.

CORSAIR’s own website heatmap data is already revealing encouraging growth in user engagement with immersive 3D models and configurators, measured by clicks on the “View in AR” button. CORSAIR also sees the potential to slash the cost of returns, as customers will be able to clearly visualize products and how they will look in their living spaces.