“We are pleased to be working with a partner that has an evergreen product roadmap, as it gives us comfort that our amazing intranet will evolve with the latest digital design trends and still feel new in 18 months’ time. When Addin365 told us about Viva Connections we wanted to make use of it from launch. Addin365 could support that from the start because they compliment Office 365 rather than competing with it. This was a real plus for us as we want to make use of new capabilities when Microsoft make them available to us.”
Head of Corporate Affairs
Wales & West Utilities have over 2,000 colleagues who work to provide the safe, secure and reliable transportation of gas across their distribution network in Wales and the south west of England.
Wales & West Utilities’ employees are a mix of hybrid working (office/home) colleagues and field engineers. With their headquarters in Newport, Wales, the communications team wanted to update their intranet, Pipeline.
Wales & West Utilities wanted a more intuitive and engaging intranet that would promote increased engagement and collaboration – and was moving in parallel to the 365 journey of their IT infrastructure.
The new intranet would need to be cost and time effective – and easy to use. It also needed to make accessing essential documents as straightforward as possible.
The new intranet would also need to work on mobile as well as desktop, to support the front-line workers at Wales & West Utilities.
Wales & West Utilities decided on a SharePoint Modern intranet experience and invested in all three Addin365 intranet product modules – that extend the SharePoint Modern experience
Wales & West Utilities also engaged Addin365 to provide consulting, training and information architecture services, as well as a fresh new look and feel.
Employees
Customers
Service delivery
Addin365 worked with Wales & West Utilities to evolve their departmental based information model to one that was more operationally focused.
This pivot will support colleagues better in completing the tasks they set out to do. For example, customer services will now incorporate processes, the service catalogue, customer research and market opportunity awareness, rather than these content areas sitting under departments such as marketing and regulation.
Content to do with connecting households to the gas supply, servicing them and liaising with local authorities on scheduled works were previously documents in a library. The new intranet creates centres for this information in SharePoint Modern, that allows Wales & West Utilities employees to find the content easily and contextualises the content based on customer experience.
Wales & West Utilities decided to invest in Addin365’s Content Confidence Kit. The Kit presents colleagues with a bot on intranet pages, that they can engage with to ask questions and discover answers. From the intranet team’s perspective, the bot is reading the intranet, so they are not needing to manage separate knowledge bases. This allows for an exciting user experience – without the management overhead. Once the bot has answered a question, the colleague is invited to provide feedback on the answer. This feedback is routed to a Microsoft Team where content owners can consume the feedback and update their content to reflect what employees are looking for.
Wales & West Utilities have chosen to deploy Viva Connections to take advantage of the personalisation this service layer provides, with followed sites, files and a navigation that is specific to the individual and adjusts based on colleagues’ content choices.
We caught up with Jaime Falarczyk, Head of Corporate Affairs, for his advise to organisations looking to enhance their employee experience.
– Think about your architecture from the perspective of the colleague and how they consume information, rather than what makes sense for the people that produce it.
– Start content production early. We used Addin365’s workbooks that allow our content SMEs to collate their content ahead of their site being ready. This means they will simply cut and paste from their Word document to the site before go-Live.
– Choose a partner that will help you get the best out of Office 365 and not just their own product. Addin365 took the time to upskill us on SharePoint, Teams and Viva Connections as well as their own product modules. This means we can get the most out of all our technology investments.
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