Mobile devices are not only changing the way companies communicate with customers, they are also shifting the way they communicate with their workforce. The line between work and personal time is fading and employees are becoming increasingly connected. Many enterprises are looking for innovative ways to communicate with their workforce on mobile.
Our customer ING, a renowned financial services company of Dutch origin, is one of these forward-thinking institutions. The bank recently released a real time news app to share the latest and most relevant company updates with employees. We spoke with ING’s Aletta van Asperen this week to learn more about the app and its adoption among their workforce thus far.
Aletta, what was the motivation for creating the news app?
ING Netherlands believes in ‘mobile first’ as a strategy to provide services to our customers. Therefore, we put significant effort into making products and services available on mobile. This is valid for our customers and also for our workforce: mobile is faster, more accessible and easy to use. We believe it will make our ING-colleagues highly motivated and engaged. That is why we decided to bring all the internal headlines from different departments together in one place: the ING News App.
Are mobile marketing and mobile content a high priority for ING?
Mobile is definitely a high priority for ING, for both external and internal purposes. We have a large group of colleagues who are ‘on the road’ during the day and have therefore adopted ‘a new way of working.’ Employees have the flexibility to work in different places at different times. Our communications strategy has to match these developments. Making our content available on mobile devices is key. This year, we launched our mobile version of ING News via the app. Next year, we are planning to combine this with our internal social platform.
What are the biggest challenges you face in optimizing your content for mobile?
The biggest challenge is to make it work within the ING environment, within a complex IT-landscape that matches our security standards. ImgZine’s platform enabled us to create an out of the box solution to address this challenge, and to do it fast.
How have your employees reacted to the app so far?
The launch of the app took place in mid-November. Within the first three weeks, thousands of colleagues downloaded the app. This shows that it clearly addresses a need within the organization to provide oversight on all that is happening within ING Netherlands. The greatest challenge for the coming months is to stimulate frequent use. The first step is to get employees to download the app, a step further is for it to become one of the top 10 most frequently used apps on their mobile device. That is our ultimate goal.
How do you envision the app contributing to your communications more generally?
The ING News App will allow us to communicate with our colleagues more easily. Because the app is fast, easy to use and available 24/7 we expect that more people will want to use it to keep up to date with the latest ING news. Furthermore it will also contribute to the image that our colleagues have of ING: an innovative organization that they are proud to work for.
What is your company doing to optimize communications on mobile? Share your experiences with us in the comments!
