A major player in digital and e-commerce in France in the mobility sector, SNCF Connect & Tech relies on the expertise of more than 1,200 employees, who make up the community of #DigitalMobilityChangers. Their role: to design and implement customer digital solutions to make sustainable mobility accessible to all.

The customer experience at the heart of SNCF Connect & Tech’s digital projects

To build customer loyalty and offer them the best possible experience at each stage of the buying process, the management Customer experience (DCX) dedicated to SNCF Connect is working on the design, coordination and overall consistency of routes for all digital contact points of the SNCF Connect service.

The DCX dedicated to SNCF Connect drives an approach based on knowledge of users and the ecosystem, both digital and physical, to guarantee the relevance and efficiency of the digital information, distribution and ticketing service.

This is what allows us to differentiate the SNCF Connect service in terms of perceived value and gives us a competitive advantage, explains Ingrid Peiniau, Continuous Improvement and CX Quality manager for SNCF Connect.

The expertise of SNCF Connect & Tech at the service of users

To meet these challenges, the management is organized around 3 areas of expertise, with specific missions and key deliverables: Design Research & Vision, Continuous Improvement and Quality CX, and Product Design.

Design Research & Vision

It is a center of expertise whose main missions consist in supporting the work of exploration, vision and evaluation by an in-depth knowledge of the uses of the users. This also involves the design of founding tools to guide the Design strategy.

To do this, the team mobilizes several skills:

• Fondamental research : ethnographic studies, focus groups, logbooks, mobility experience maps, personae, etc.
• Evaluative research: ergonomic tests, guerrilla tests, etc.
• Service design and forward-looking design: ideation/vision workshops, design fiction, experiential principles, eco-design guidelines, etc.

The objective of the systems implemented is to propose a strategic course and to provide tools, methodologies as well as lessons to guide the design of a more relevant, efficient, responsible and emotional customer experience.

By way of illustration, the following experiential principles, built on the basis of several studies (ethnographic, quantitative, market, etc.), served as a compass in the decision-making of the design biases throughout the SNCF Connect project:

• reliable service,
• An inclusive service,
• A proactive service,
• A global, coherent and continuous experience,
• A responsible and educational service.

Thanks to its expertise, this team plays a key role in spreading the design culture internally.

Continuous Improvement and CX Quality

For its part, the center of expertise in charge of continuous improvement and the quality of the customer experience complements the Discovery systems, with the aim of better mastering knowledge of current routes and promoting the emergence of new opportunities or optimizations.

The division supports projects throughout their life cycle, both in the upstream phases of Delivery to better calibrate the challenges of a project, identify their impact on the ecosystem and provide relevant solutions; as well as on the Delivery and post-Delivery phases, to guarantee the quality of the designs and limit the experiential debt (analytical contributions, framing of the KPIs to be impacted and REX, compliance with accessibility issues, optimization of editorial guidelines).

On a daily basis, this division mobilizes various skills:

• Service design (design thinking, maps/blueprints)
• Digital accessibility and disability expertise
• CRO (UX analytics & A/B testing)
• UX writing,
• CX project management

Employees are in permanent contact with business referents in the product, marketing, sales and customer relations universes, with a view to challenging projects and continuous improvement roadmaps, while keeping customer and business performance objectives in sight.

Product Design

The Product Design team’s mission is to build and embody the experiences of SNCF Connect users, whether they are customers or simple users. They structure the designs, prioritize the elements of information and materialize by wireframes or prototypes solutions to be tested, before producing the visuals, interactions and animations of the graphic interfaces.

The quality and performance of our design depend as much on our ability to design courses that meet the needs of our users as on our ability to produce deliverables with speed, predictability and consistency, specifies Julien Bouvet, Product Design Manager.

The division thus brings together different skills:

• Product Design
• Prototyping
• Artistic direction
• DesignOps
• Design System

But thinking about simple, efficient and engaging paths is not enough: the success of their realization also lies in the ability to work hand in hand with the various Discovery and Delivery players, including Product Management and Tech.

The expertise of these 3 areas of activity puts their know-how to work in short structured cycles, facilitated by their proximity, from the emergence of each of the projects to the monitoring of their production launch: whether the creation of the SNCF Connect service itself, but also of the new functionalities gradually put into production.

Transparency is a key element of our operation, with a standardized workflow, regular exchanges to define the scope of intervention of the DCX teams, a balance between stability and flexibility, in an approach where collaboration plays an essential role whatever or the project to be developed.

Design System: an example of the techniques used for SNCF Connect

In order to guarantee industrialization that is consistent and that meets the criteria of excellence set by the entity, the DCX supported the project to create SNCF Connect by launching a Design System. It is based on the following pillars:

• A breakdown of all the display or interaction bricks,
• Accurate documentation, directly within Figma,
• A mirrored documentation for the technical side of these components, both for React and Flutter,
• Cross-functional processes between Tech and CX to build, mature and integrate interface elements,
• A close collaboration between Design System referents and a product-oriented artistic direction role.

The Design System also makes it possible to structure, standardize and document the use of the atomic elements of the paths, as well as the different color palettes (themes) and components, for product designers and developers alike. Each component is themable, which makes it possible to quickly adapt the routes such as, for example, the illustration of the dark and light themes present today in the SNCF Connect application. Thus, for the DCX, “ the Design System lives as a product in its own right in our portfolio of solutions “.

Would you like to join the teams dedicated to customer experience and design within SNCF Connect & Tech and be part of the community of #DigitalMobilityChangers?

The DCX is recruiting for several positions:

Join the #DigitalMobilityChangers community