Personalizing Dutch Railways' employee communication

The Dutch Railway systems (NS) has tens of thousands of people  working for them all over the Netherlands. In order to communicate the  appropriate information to all those employees, NS was looking for a  smart and dynamic internal communication solution. We helped them solve  their information overload and target their employees more efficiently. 

Every  day, 21.000 people get out of bed to work for NS, the Dutch Railways.  They assist travellers, check tickets, drive the trains, make sure the  right information is on the screens and displays, sell coffee and  safeguard the safety in trains and stations. To get the right  information to all of those people, NS sends out thousands of messages  and newsletters by e-mail, through intranet and a mobile application.  They use a central digital experience platform called ePublisher to send  out all of those messages. The problem was, however, that employees  experienced information overload. Specifying and targeting the right  information to the right people is not an easy task for an organization  of this size: out of the 21,000 employees, 2,500 different audience  types can be identified. These different groups, specified by things  like location, age, role within the company and preferences, all have  different communication needs that constantly change.

Targeted, personal and efficient

At  We Are North, we are driven by making people’s work easier and more  fun, so that’s where we started: by asking what would make the  communication department’s daily work more efficient. Their biggest  demand was to find a solution that optimizes their target selection  process. They wanted to be able to easily create subscriber groups,  selecting one or more subsets, without having to manage everything  manually. They also wanted a functionality that enables them to send out  personal publications, indicating which type of content is intended for  whom. After sending out the relevant information to the right people, a  Single Customer View was needed in order to see how the receiver  responds to the information, so communication can be further optimized  based on these findings in the future.

Analyzing and optimizing

For  the Dutch Railways, we created a seamless experience that can be  accessed through different channels, both through desktop and a mobile  application. In an Audience Manager, the communication department can  review how effective their last publication was: they can see how the  user scrolled through the interface and which articles were opened.  Newsletters can also be tracked, for example showing which links were  clicked on. In short, we gave NS the right tools to target their  employees more efficiently by creating their own target groups and  enabling them to analyze and review the results of their communication  strategies.