Having grown rapidly having expanded from 70 employees to 200 in the space of 12 months, XEIAD required rapidly deployable tools to foster cultural integration.
XEIAD is the largest UK provider of inspecting the UK infrastructure, supporting the end-to-end management of a range of civil engineering assets across rail, highways and marine, utilities and defence.
The challenge
The growth of the company meant there was a need to increase their internal change communications. An employee survey backed this up with many employees stating that internal communications was an area that needed to be improved.
Previously XEIAD were reliant on Outlook to communicate. Their communications always had to fit into a three-column email and once sent, there was no way of knowing if those communications were read. It also took a long time to create each communication which meant XEIAD were forced to be very reactive.
The solution
Jo Hemmings is the Marketing and Communications Manager at XEIAD and she explains the journey she went on to transform how they communicate with employees.
"I joined XEIAD a month after the employee survey took place. Based on the results of that survey, internal communications was one of my top priorities. But as well as improving the process, I wanted to be able to evidence how effective those improvements were."
“I was aware of NewZapp from a previous role but had never used it. Together with three other providers, I had a demo of the software and began comparing them. "
“My requirements were pretty simple – I needed an easy way to communicate with our employees and a way to see if our new approach was working. I also wanted a platform that was really flexible. I knew that we needed to change how we communicate, but because I was so new in the role, I didn’t know exactly what we’d be communicating, so I needed a system that would evolve with us."
“Once I saw NewZapp in action I knew it ticked all the boxes. It gave me everything I needed but didn’t overcomplicate anything. The analytics were really impressive, and the ability to craft the emails however you wish was exactly the kind of flexibility I needed. The fact NewZapp are UK based was also a big draw.”
The results
XEIAD were up and running within days. When a new customer joins NewZapp they are assigned their own Account Manager who supports them every step of the way. Jo found this particularly refreshing.
XEIAD now send monthly newsletters, messages from the MD, new starter welcome messages, internal vacancies and regular awareness campaigns through NewZapp, creating clarity of communications and creating cultural integration across the growing team.
When comparing NewZapp with their previous way of working, this is what Jo said:
“NewZapp has made an enormous difference to us. We can now keep the teams up to date with the information they want to know about, and my life is so much easier! The useability is brilliant – I don’t have any restrictions anymore. But even better than that is the time it saves. Compared to how we communicated before, I easily save an hour for every communication I send out. When you are juggling so many things, that makes such a difference. For the first time we can be proactive with our comms rather than just reactive.”
Saving time
We asked Jo what it was that saved her so much time. Here’s what she said:
"There’s no one thing that is a big time saver, it’s everything combined: * Now I can copy a previous email and reuse it for my next campaign, or I can just reuse parts of an email if that’s all I need. * I don’t have to resize or alter images before using them anymore. * Keeping my distribution list up to date is super easy. * The email editor is brilliant – the drag ‘n’ drop elements make it so easy to build an email."
The analytics
One of the other aspects Jo was keen to introduce was greater visibility over their internal comms efforts. The analytics dashboard within NewZapp shows the usual stats such as open and click rates. The dashboard also shows data such as peak engagement times, device usage and a heatmap to show which parts of the email were of most interest. Here’s Jo’s review of the analytics:
“The analytics have been hugely valuable. A lot of our employees work shift patterns, so I’ve been able to work out the best times to send important messages based on the data in NewZapp."
“I’ve been tweaking what we send out based on the analytics and our engagement rates have been climbing as a result. I’ve also been reporting on what we are doing so our leadership team can see both the value and the improvement.”
In summary
When asked to sum NewZapp up in a couple of sentences, this is Jo’s conclusion:
“NewZapp gives me the usability and data I need but it does so with such ease. Everything is intuitive and their personable support is the cherry on the cake!”
Jo plans to continue to hone and improve XEIAD’s internal communications. She has also started the process of bringing NewZapp in for their external communications too.
“I’ve been really impressed with NewZapp. I can see lots of ways that it can help with our external communications too so I’m putting a business case together to do just that.”
