The challenge

National Express LLC (NELLC) is the North American subsidiary of National Express Group, PLC, one of the premier transportation firms in the United Kingdom. They provide customer focused transportation services, including charter bus trips, bus shuttles and logistics planning for events of any size across the United States and Canada. Event planners and organizations across North America partner with NELLC to experience best in class customer service, cost efficiencies and safety.

National Express asked Fynydd to help them grow their Durham Charter and School Services businesses. We worked with National Express stakeholders to understand their marketing challenges and the needs of their prospective customers. Once the landscape was understood, we recommended a new content structure focusing on user needs. There was some friction with the client at first regarding the display of price ranges and other information. They had concerns over being clear with customers regarding information that was difficult to quantify.

They also wanted leads to be pushed into their Salesforce account so that representatives could easily follow-up with customers through a centralized mechanism.

National Express

Industry

  • Commercial transportation

Project timeline

  • 6 months to MVP

Fynydd services

  • API integrations
  • CMS development
  • Gap analysis
  • Technical research, consulting
  • User experience strategy and design
  • User interface design

The result

National Express required that the solution be built in their on-premises SharePoint environment. We built custom data objects and templates to turn their file sharing and collaboration platform into proper public websites. We integrated with Salesforce.com, pushing leads into their account, triggering alerts and workflows based on geographic location and distribution center. Customer location was determined using browser geolocation features, which were then correlated with distribution center coordinates via Google Maps.

We worked with National Express IT to deploy the sites to production, and in the end, the website redesigns were a big success as evidenced by the 1,800% increase in generated leads in the first year.

Summary

  • On-premises SharePoint implementations for two public websites
  • New content structure targeting user needs
  • Modern user interface design
  • Google maps geolocation integration for service center locations and lead form submission
  • Salesforce.com integration with lead forms
  • Supporting lead generation for over 200 dispatch centers with 17,000 buses in 32 states

ROI

  • 1,800% increase in charter lead count
  • Happy client and customers!