Introducing CitySprint’s Employees’ Collaboration & Innovation Lab
CitySprint provides same day, overnight and international courier services across multiple sectors. Our healthcare division specializes in delivering critical medical equipment, lifesaving organs and blood supplies, prescriptions and controlled drugs to thousands of pharmacies and hospitals throughout the UK. In addition, CitySprint provides a variety of print and direct mail solutions.
CitySprint has 40 service centres and 750 members of office based staff across the UK. Our network of 3000+ couriers is in addition to this.
With such a high level of staff in multiple locations, working on different services and products, internal communications is essential to our business.
Before Interact
Prior to partnering with Interact, delivering internal communications on our previous intranet was time consuming, inconsistent and very one-way. The geographical spread of our service centres and support functions made it difficult for employees to stay up-to-date with the latest projects being worked on or access the latest versions of documents and collateral. Most concerning was the fact employees didn’t have the ability to easily communicate with colleagues or share information that could be mutually beneficial.
Introducing CitySprint’s Employees’ Collaboration & Innovation Lab
CitySprint’s new and much improved intranet went live in September 2014. Ahead of this, a competition was launched across the business, giving all staff the chance to come up with a fitting name for the new system. We received almost 300 entries, which immediately proved we had buy-in from the wider team and that employees were engaged from the start. There were some great entries, with Cecil (CitySprint’s Employees’ Collaboration & Innovation Lab) being the winner.
The name Cecil gave us the opportunity to create a character that would become the figure of the site. He gives the intranet a strong persona and staff now refer to the site as though it is a real person, which is exactly what we had hoped for.
Once the system was named the launch campaign began! Over a two week period, a series of six emails were rolled out, showing Cecil travelling across the UK (where our service centres are based) and further afield. In every location Cecil visited, he picked up a new skill that would become part of the finished intranet. This gave us the chance to use each email to explain a different section/function of the site. We also began to promote Cecil’s own email address: askcecil@citysprint.co.uk as the place to send all feedback, suggestions and content ideas.
Cecil Mania
As the ‘go live’ stage approached, we got to work creating what became known as ‘Cecil Mania’. Cecil branded collateral started to appear in every office, every service centre, every meeting room and on every desk! We made sure that these branded items were unique, useful and attention grabbing. They included: A3 desk pads, Cecil branded headphones, self standing banners for the boardroom, Cecil desktop cut-outs, physically printed Cecil masks and downloadable Cecil masks.
Cecil Mania quickly became a CitySprint phenomenon, with all the branded collateral in very high demand from every part of the business. A news article detailing Cecil Mania was added to Cecil’s homepage and all service centres were encouraged to share their Cecil Mania photos. We received an overwhelming response.
Interact also took part in Cecil Mania by tweeting a photo of its staff in our, much loved, Cecil masks.
In total, 650 packs of Cecil collateral were distributed to CitySprint staff:
‘Go live’
Once Cecil had made his way onto the homepage of all CitySprint staff computers, we needed to secure daily engagement. We created a 90 second video guide, to help staff find their way around the site and get used to Cecil’s core functions. Not only did the video showcase functionality, ease-of-use and navigation, it also brought Cecil to life and made him a key member of the business – albeit a virtual one!
The video was a mix of animation, to bring Cecil to life, and screen recordings to demonstrate a real-time user experience:
Top tips and user guides
Alongside the video, a series of top tips and user guides were created to be a staple resource for all Cecil users. These guides were displayed as a show reel of banners on the homepage covering: how to use Cecil’s social feed, options for uploading and finding documents, how to create bespoke team pages and what functions can be accessed via the top menu buttons.
The main purpose of our user guides was to ensure all staff felt confident enough to start utilising Cecil from the moment the site went live. As a complete fail-safe backup, we also put together an all encompassing 12-page user manual.
Cecil’s Master Guide
1) How to complete your personal profile
2) How to ensure your contact details are correct
3) How to book a meeting room
4) Top tips
5) Document management
6) How to use your activity feed and what it shows
7) How to update your status
8) How to increase your social score
9) How to use Cecil’s search tool
10) How to create and join team pages
11) How to give feedback to authors of articles
12) How to manage order forms
Two weeks after ‘go live’, another promotional email was sent out to the business, asking the question; Have you met Cecil yet? This email was our way of letting everyone know a simple, but very thorough user guide was available and sharing a few best practice guidelines around profile pictures and content. It was also another shameless chance to remind people that Cecil had arrived!
Increasing employee engagement
As soon as the site was up and running and people had begun to get used to Cecil, we launched a Cecil challenge. The first of many over the next 12 months.
A form was created on Cecil’s homepage that listed a number of riddles. Cecil users had to complete the riddles, knowing that all answers were either associated with different Cecil portals or documents available on Cecil. The competition ran for only seven days, but during that time the competition received well over 100 unique visitors.
To enhance the social side of Cecil, each user was encouraged to create their own personal profile with a picture, a list of their expertise, a brief bio, a bit about their interests and their contact details.
Cecil has his own profile with 109 followers and we now use his status updates to announce various additions to the site:
Proving success
By the end of September 2014, just three weeks after ‘go live’, the video user guide had received 298 views – just under 50% of all CitySprint staff at the time.
During the first month (8/9/14 – 30/9/14) Cecil gained a total of 626 unique users – around 95% of CitySprint staff during this period, which is well above the industry benchmark.
Visits & page views
The platform received a total of 13,964 visits, accumulating to 67,113 page views, averaging five page views per visit, during this first month.
Top five most shared and liked pages during launch
