Like many global enterprises scaling digital operations, Culligan was navigating the difference between treading water and getting ahead.
The assessment was designed to answer one practical question: where should Culligan centralize to create leverage, and where should local markets retain the flexibility needed to serve customers well?
Thirty-plus markets and business units were running digital independently. Salesforce was not fully deployed, CRM practices varied across business units, EMEA and U.S. marketing teams operated as strong but separate organizations, and vendor relationships had grown organically over time. Leadership also saw an opportunity to simplify the vendor landscape, reduce duplicative spend, and make future investment decisions with greater confidence.
Leadership needed a global baseline: what Culligan had, where there was redundancy, where centralization would create leverage, and where local markets genuinely needed autonomy. AI readiness was part of that picture, but the larger challenge was building the architecture, governance, digital experience foundation, and operating model required to execute transformation with confidence.
Operating across 30+ global markets meant digital maturity naturally varied. A global UX assessment across 38 Culligan-owned and affiliated sites confirmed that best-in-class digital experiences already existed inside the portfolio — but consistency was the gap. Some markets had built strong, conversion-ready experiences. Others had evolved independently, creating inconsistency in how customers experienced the brand.
The opportunity was not to fix what was broken. It was to protect what was already working, close the gap between global ambitions and the enterprise foundation needed to support them, and scale the standard the strongest markets had already proven.
Culligan engaged Elevate to validate what was working, identify where the enterprise could move faster, and build a roadmap grounded in architecture, readiness, and business value — not aspiration.
Before the first major program kicked off, Culligan had already identified immediate savings and a clearer path for enterprise architecture, CRM governance, digital experience modernization, ways of working, and targeted AI activation where it could create practical value.
Culligan left the engagement with more than a roadmap. They had a clear current to move the enterprise forward: immediate savings, a global digital baseline, prioritized modernization opportunities, sequenced implementation programs, and the internal momentum to act.
Elevate helped Culligan define what needed to be fixed first, where standardization would create the most value, how local flexibility should be preserved, and how to sequence transformation in a way the organization could actually absorb. AI remained a supporting workstream, focused on practical opportunities such as customer care rather than the headline of the engagement.
The website assessment confirmed that Culligan's strongest digital experiences were already competitive at a global standard. The roadmap now ensures those standards are protected, enforced, and scaled across every market. The work created alignment across stakeholders, clarity around decision-making, and a practical foundation for moving from AI ambition to governed action.
The Culligan engagement was run through Elevate Ascend™, Elevate Digital’s proprietary operating model for aligning stakeholders, validating the current state, shaping the roadmap, and preparing teams for the work ahead.
The methodology gave Culligan a governed path to assess readiness, pressure-test assumptions, define decision rights, and connect strategic ambition to practical execution.
The engagement was also supported by the Elevate Intelligence Platform™, Elevate Digital’s AI-native knowledge platform built for client discovery, insight capture, and reusable enterprise intelligence.
During discovery, the platform helped capture Culligan’s institutional knowledge across 30 business units, improving the depth and consistency of data collection. It helped reduce missed requirements, create stronger alignment across stakeholders, and turn discovery inputs into clearer recommendations and action plans.
Together, Elevate Ascend™ and the Elevate Intelligence Platform™ created a repeatable advantage: human judgment stayed in control, AI accelerated the work, and every interaction with Culligan contributed to measurable business value.
The roadmap extends from assessment into implementation: strengthening the enterprise architecture and data foundation, rationalizing CRM, activating practical AI use cases in areas like customer care, improving operating rhythms and ways of working, establishing transformation governance, and preparing for a 30-market website replatform built for Culligan’s global scale.