Thalys is a train company based in Brussels that is mainly famous for its Paris-Brussels trip, but which also serves Amsterdam, Bourg-St-Maurice, Düsseldorf and Marseille! Every year, the red trains transport more than 7 million travellers.
Thalys started in 1995 as a cooperation between the national train companies of France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherland (DB, NS, SNCB and SNCF). Then, twenty years later, Thalys became an independent railway company with its own employees in and out of the trains. Today, Train Drivers and Train Managers represent 50% of Thalys’ workforce.
Cream started to work with Thalys at the moment it became independent. The railway company’s main product actually is its website from which all its income comes. Therefore, it’s quite important that it is perfect. Its redesign and revamping has been a major project for Thalys and Cream’s team helped a lot.
It was both a business (marketing, content, performance,…) and IT (coding, integration with various partners,…) project.
On the business side, Cream worked both on the content redaction and on the performance analysis. Many things that you can read on Thalys’ website has been written by Creamers. We also implemented A/B testing to understand better the user experience and develop the best solution.
On the IT side, Cream’s Project Managers and Product Owners were involved. The first ones were mainly in charge of a project with SNCF’s IT partner while the second ones really made the bridge between IT and business by writing user stories and prioritizing the backlog. The Product Owners were the point of contact between many stakeholders, some of them being in France which made communication a bit harder.
The fact that many Creamers were involved in this huge project all over the company really fostered the innovation and made the communication easier. Thalys really liked Creamer’s integration within the teams and the engagement and ownership that we brought! Then, early 2019, Thalys’ new website came out and you can admire the results #here#. The business manager that followed the project and the consultants even wrote a nice #LinkedIn post# about it.
Today, Thalys faces new challenges as many initiatives rise up every day. And Creamers are right there to help again!