Northern Trains Limited

The Client

Northern Trains Limited is owned by DfT OLR Holdings Limited (DOHL), which took on the operation of Northern services in March 2020. Northern plays a vital role in the north of England by connecting tens of thousands of people to work, leisure, education, and more every day.

The Situation

Northern Trains Limited was taken back into public ownership in 2020. Before this, it had unfortunately gained a reputation for poor customer service, receiving the lowest customer satisfaction score in the UK for a railway franchise. Management realized things needed to change, starting with the company’s website. As a critical communication tool and travel management system, the company’s new website needed to increase passenger journeys, provide an improved customer experience, and create a positive return on investment.

The Challenge

The previous Northern website was symptomatic of the poor customer experience for which the company was known: 

• Built on a legacy content management system, the website had not been designed in an agile way.
• Manual changes were necessary to keep the site updated with relevant information for customers, but staff found the content management system difficult to use, meaning site updates took time.
• Customers had difficulty managing their accounts, needing multiple accounts for different tasks. 
• Varied site structures, overuse of sub-domains, and inconsistent branding meant customers couldn’t easily navigate the website.
• Poor SEO meant the site wasn’t featured in the top three results for relevant search terms.
• The automation and personalization experience was underwhelming, with minimal dynamic content.
• Mobile site speed was slow, deterring customers.
• Customers couldn’t easily find real-time information pertinent to their journey, and the information was not presented in an easy-to-consume way.

With the organization going through rapid digital transformation, including introducing a new CRM platform, it was critical to get the new website up and running fast. Northern needed its website to:

• Radically improve the digital customer experience
• Provide ways for customers to get the information they need more easily
• Help the brand connect and resonate with its audience again
• Support the recovery of traffic lost during the pandemic
• Offer more paths to purchase
• Allow quick development of promotions

The Solution

Northern partnered with Paragon DCX, a full-service digital transformation and marketing agency, to create an agile website on Drupal that provides relevant, up-to-date customer and employer information and creates a seamless, simple, and rewarding experience for customers.

DCX conducted research with the Northern customer base, consolidating and identifying five different personas representing different user groups. It identified customer journey pain points at an industry-wide level, as well as Northern-specific pain points, and discovered that customers wanted a website that showed the company understood their needs and answered them in a way that cuts through the train jargon.

To address this concern, the DCX team introduced the idea of a conversational interface that would be used across the entire site wherever the scenario called for it. The Conversational UI feature focused on improving customer service so customers could get the most out of the information. For example, when a customer is looking at station information, the UI feature asks them where they are traveling from and provides relevant information within the component — without forcing the user to visit a separate page. 

Additionally, one of the key feature requirements of the new website was the ability to create pages for all the journeys that can be taken via Northern, and then show customers helpful information about their journey – for example, fare prices and travel time between stations. Northern manages over 500 stations, representing nearly one-fifth of all the UK’s 3,000 train stations. Having a page for every journey you can take to or from a Northern station meant a whopping 3 million in total. 

For each of these pages, DCX needed to fetch data from the National Rail Services Online Journey Planner API, make further API calls to get data for individual journeys, and then process the data to be able to calculate helpful customer information, like the average duration of the trip and the cheapest ticket. With the old website on Episerver, this functionality required a dedicated server to handle the load these processes used. As well as incurring significant additional costs, this setup meant fewer journey pages could be built and slowed the website response. Moving to Acquia Cloud Platform provided Northern with considerable performance gains. 

By running the code for journey pages within the same hosting environment as the Drupal CMS, the company increased the number of website pages, increasing search engine visibility and delivering a better digital experience.

The Results

Within six months, the new Drupal site has delivered an impressive improvement in customer numbers and brand perception:

• 100,000 new customers
• Revenue increased 43%
• Average order value increased by 3%
• Increase in bookings via advertising campaigns delivered a 5:1 ROI
• Increased customer loyalty as measured by CRM signups
• Grew CRM database by 10,000 from website signups
• Sessions increased by 48%
• New users increased by 41%
• Average time on page increased by 74%
• Entrances into ticketing system via the widget increased by 69%
• Transactions increased by 25%
• App downloads driven by the website increased by 258%
• Mobile sessions, new users, pages viewed, revenue all increased
• Organic search rankings, clicks and clickthrough rates all increased