A plan for change
We gave LNER a prioritised list of practical next steps and near-term projects.
- Client
- LNER
- Sector
- Travel
- Duration
- 8 weeks
- What we did
- User research
- Digital strategy
- Digital service design
LNER don’t think of themselves as a train company. They’re a customer service company. They know that the key to providing excellent customer service lies with their front-line staff.
LNER needed to figure out the needs and wants of their staff. That’s why they got Clearleft to come on board. Literally.
LNER’s Digital & Innovation team knew there was an opportunity for digital to help front-line staff. But they needed to understand the realities staff faced before designing a new experience for them. We needed to figure out how to bridge that gap.
To do that, we had to get out from behind our screens.
Clearleft took the time to understand the daily realities for our front-line teams. Their on-site research gave first-hand insights into our people, which remote work alone could not have achieved. This gave a solid foundation for their recommendations about how we can improve the digital experience for our front-line colleagues.
The Results
A vision video
We produced a video demonstrating the future vision played at a board meeting deciding on digital investment.
A shared direction
The digital team and front-line staff now share a vision of how digital can evolve to better support people over the next five years.
The Full Story
How do you find out what your staff need to do their work?
If you want to improve customer experience, you obviously need to listen to your customers. But to really embed excellent customer service, you need to listen to your staff too. That’s at the heart of internal service design.
We began by doing some initial desk research, investigating what opportunities digital technologies could offer front-line staff. Equipped with this understanding of digital capabilities, we began our research safari.
The watering holes for this safari were the train stations at either end of long journeys. We spent our days with the staff at these stations and on board the trains.
It was eye-opening to see how the staff dealt with situations in cramped spaces: serving food in a narrow railway carriage; helping customers with luggage in a busy station.
Even though we were looking for opportunities to use digital technologies to help the staff, we noticed how helpful analogue technologies can be. Like pockets. We noticed how often they needed to reach into their pockets to access information.
How do you know which tools will work best?
We realised that if the staff were to rely on screen-based technologies too much, it could end up harming the customer experience. If you’re helping a customer, you want to be able to look at them, not at a screen. And there are some situations where you simply can’t give your attention to a screen, like when you’re sending off a train.
It quickly became clear that what mattered to the staff was timely, relevant information. No two days at LNER are the same, and any disruption has the potential to cascade if the staff don’t know what’s happening. Making digital work smarter with predictive information feeding into proactive solutions will keep staff informed of any changes, so they can handle customer queries much better.
We saw how the staff were coming up with their own workarounds to keep one another informed. Whenever you see those kinds of bottom-up hacks being invented, you know there’s an untapped opportunity for improvement.
Most of all, we saw the passion that people have for their jobs. They are laser-focused on customer service. That’s the key to LNER’s future—put people, not technology, at the centre. Digital needs to be the reliable sidekick in colleagues’ pockets, rather than the hero stealing the show.
How do you set out a vision for the future with practical next steps?
When it came to delivering our findings and recommendations, we had to get the balance just right. We needed to deliver something exciting and ambitious, but also grounded and achievable. Transformational, but realistic.
LNER had an existing vision blueprint, but it was focused on the far future, fifteen years out. It felt disconnected from present-day reality. We wanted to provide a tangible way to get to a realistic vision of the future. To do that, we delivered our research insights in combination with practical next steps for projects over the next 12 to 18 months.
To bring our concept into the real world, we produced a vision video looking five years into the future. By prototyping the future staff experience and giving people something to point at, the vision becomes tangible. The video has been played in board meetings to unlock investment and is being taken out on the road to excite staff and show the future LNER is working towards.
By delivering future goals in combination with practical next steps, Clearleft provided that balance between what is achievable and what is exciting.