Superdrug, a health and beauty retailer with over 800 locations across the UK and Ireland, wanted to replace their outdated Intranet with a modern, engaging, and easy-to-use system for their 12,000 employees.

After researching over 20 vendors, Superdrug adopted MangoApps for its intuitive operability, balanced communication interface, and multi-platform functionality.

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In this video, you will learn how Superdrug used MangoApps to:

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1. Foster an increased sense of an interconnected community
2. Facilitate collaboration across different departments and international borders
3. Create a centralized knowledge hub for on-the-go employees

Full video transcript:

Vikki Nye, Internal Comms Manager:

“So, Superdrug’s a health and beauty retailer, so we sell products from cosmetics to flu vaccinations, and everything in-between. We have 12,000 employees and 800 stores.”

Andrew Cobb, IT Director:

“So the goal of this project was to create a modern and engaging platform to replace an old and out of date intranet system that we had. We wanted it to be used on personal devices by store colleagues as well as office workers. We wanted it to be secure, we wanted it to be fresh and modern.”

Vikki Nye, Internal Comms Manager:

“A few years ago, we had a existing intranet, but it was a bit outdated, and we had some issues with usability and accessibility, and they were the key feedback that we got from employees about why they didn’t use it. But we still felt that there was a real need to have something that enables people to collaborate, share cross-functionally news, success, best practice, and things like that, so we started to look for something that kind of ticked the boxes that our current provider maybe wasn’t doing.

Overall, we probably looked at over 20 different providers before we narrowed it down to a list of five which we then took on to the next stage of the process, so to speak. And throughout the process, we had a real kind of wishlist where we sort of said, “These are the key sort of 10 things, maybe,” that we really wanted the product to deliver, and it actually turned out that really MangoApps was the only product that kind of did all of those things well, and actually ticked all the boxes, but not only ticked them, ticked them for everything in a really good, collaborative, exciting, future-facing way.

So, it balanced really well social and business. So a lot of providers that we looked at did social really well, but didn’t do business really well, or did business really well and didn’t do social really well. MangoApps seems to found this kind of perfect middle zone where it’s kind of incredibly social, but you can also get real key business benefits of being able to do some actual core business functionality alongside it as well, so you actually get kind of a return on investment. It’s so easy to use and it’s so easy to get, so as soon as you get on it, you just get what it’s about, you get the feel, you know how to use it. If you don’t know how to use it, you kind of click about and you just figure it out yourself, it’s kind of… It’s just so intuitive that you don’t need any hand-holding, and I think as soon as something’s easy, then why wouldn’t you use it?”

Jo Mackie, Customer and People Director:

“I’m so happy with MangoApps. It has been absolutely transformational for us, it’s such an amazing tool. We love it, it’s really easy to use. The teams love it. We get nothing but positive feedback, couldn’t be happier. Because we’ve got such a large workforce in a number of different locations, Mango’s just brought everybody together, and certainly one of the biggest comments I’ve heard is, “I feel like the business got smaller because I can contact more people, and I’ve got friends that I didn’t ever know existed before.” It has been absolutely transformational for us.”

Emma Naylor, IT Project Manager:

“It’s surpassed everything we thought it would do when we launched it. When we launched it, we didn’t have to give out any real detailed instructions, everyone just took it, got on with it, and worked out how to use it, and taught us how to use it as well, which was really good, yeah.”

Vikki Nye, Internal Comms Manager:

“So, our launch went fantastically well, and I think the key reason for that is how easy to access and use the product actually is. So the fact that you can go into the iStore or the Play Store and just download an app in the nature of the way that you would download any other app or feature just makes it instantly really accessible, it makes it something that you just know how to use, and it just meant that people could just get on board really quickly with very little stress or effort, which is a huge thing.

We saw fantastic figures, so in our first eight weeks, we had over 10,000 colleagues logged on, which is an incredible statistic for an intranet system for business, and those people have just continued to come back, and not only do they visit, but they contribute regularly to the site, which just makes it feel like it’s alive, and that the business is just doing tons of really great stuff, and it just feels really great to be part of that.

We’ve had loads of absolutely fantastic feedback, I don’t actually believe we’ve had any negative feedback at all. Some of the key bits of feedback are people saying that they feel really connected, they feel like they belong to something bigger, they love the badges and the levels and things like that, they love that because it’s kind of like… It’s the competitive edge. As a business, that kind of competitive streak is quite strong with us. And they also have said things like they can’t imagine if we didn’t have it anymore, so they can’t imagine life without MangoApps anymore.

Interestingly enough, we took a bit of a risk when we launched and we decided to do a lot of activity around “It’s coming and this is how you get on,” and we did zero activity around how to use the product. We were very, very confident that it worked very intuitively, in the same way that a lot of social media does in terms of Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, that kind of thing, that we believed that people should be able to just pick up the product and kind of figure it out for themselves, and they absolutely have. At no point have we had to issue any kind of guidelines, user manuals, training sessions, or anything like that. The product does tons, so you do sometimes get a couple of queries, like “If I wanted to do this, what would be the best way to do it?” But no one has ever come to us and said, “I actually can’t understand how I get on,” or “How do I post?” Or “How do I upload a photo or a video?”

Jo Mackie, Customer and People Director:

“Oh, if I was to put a number on how many times do I go on it each day, maybe 10, to see what’s happening in the world, in the world of Superdrug. And the reason for that is that because it’s on my phone, I’m always on, therefore it’s not a difficult thing to do. You click on an app and you’re on it, so you don’t have to go through a big process to get on. It’s just really easy.

So if we’ve had fragrance advisors out for some training and they’re all fired up about what the new launches are, there’s a whole load of conversations going on, so I’d look at that. Similarly, if I want to find some information, I would know that the Hub’s the place to go for that, so sometimes I use it as part of my work day to find daft things like policies and procedures, so I would use it for that as well, so it really depends. Or sometimes you’re sitting at eight o’clock at night watching the TV and you’re just looking to see what people are talking about, what’s going on.”

Andrew Cobb, IT Director:

“So I use the Hub for posting store launch pictures and to share department updates, project updates, with both I.T. teams, and also all of the other people who are following me. So I use it at home, on my work mobile. I can also log in on my personal iPad, and at work, I use the browser on my PC, so I use all three kind of key methods of login, and they’ll all give a similar experience, which is very fresh and we like that a lot.”

David Bannister, Store Manager:

“So, we use the Hub for a whole load of things, and it’s great for communication and just sharing ideas and successes, but it’s also the main platform we use for learning and development, and a lot of our training tools are found through the Hub. So by getting a new starter logged into the Hub straight away to complete their training, we’re instilling that idea that the Hub is an everyday part of their sort of work life, and just getting them locked in from day dot, and they find it really useful just to have that at their disposal 24/7, that if they forget something that they’ve read earlier that day, they can log in at home and reread and sort of improving their own skill sets.

Think it gives them a bit of a wider perspective outside their own particular work zone. So rather than just being working in an office, or working in a store, or working on a certain counter, it just opens up this whole new branch of employee engagement, and they can just see all the things that are going on across the business and really get some great ideas on how to do the job well from the very beginning.

It’s every day, it’s… I’ve got the app on the phone, on my iPad, I’m literally on the go most days of the week, so I’m logged in pretty much permanently, and just use it as I go, sometimes in the store when I’m sharing my own sort of ideas and details, and sometimes just from a field perspective, where I can just communicate with a number of different stores, but it’s pretty much 24/7 signed in and ready to go.”

Emma Naylor, IT Project Manager:

“When I’m at work, I’ve usually got it on my desktop, and then when I’m out of work, it’s always on my phone, and I’ve got it on my personal phone, not my work phone. I feel like it’s… Although it’s part of work, it’s out of work for me as well, so I love to just catch up on it when I can. I do just love reading what people have been up to, what they’re involved in, and just general activities out in-store.”

David Bannister, Store Manager:

“So, a part of my job role involves me going out to visit some other stores in the local area and act as a sort of support function for those stores, so just to sort of send sort of layout pictures, or sort of best results or action plans that are happening in the local area, to maybe drive a little bit of idea and inspiration into some new stores.”

Vikki Nye, Internal Comms Manager:

“I use it all the time, so I’m a bit of a weird user case, I guess, because I use it as an administrator and I also use it as a user. So I guess from a work function, I use it as one of my main channels of communication to the business, to tell the business what we’re doing, and kind of key business initiatives and things like that. As a user, I just love seeing stories from people who I would never talk to on a day-to-day basis, and seeing people’s faces, just photos that people upload, and being able to actually be like, “I actually feel like I kind of know that person.”

A really interesting thing that happened on it recently was that we have some people in our stores who work specifically on our fragrance, so they kind of are specifically trained to sell people perfumes and understand kind of the makeup of perfumes so that you can advise someone on a perfume purchase, and they get invited to conferences. So one of the really nice things to see was that lots of fragrance advisors from all over the UK had started sort of organically talking on the Hub to each other because their function was similar, and a conference was coming up and they started a hashtag called Hub Buddies, and they were talking about how they can’t wait to meet people who they feel are their friends, but that they’ve actually only ever met on a digital sense. And rather than that apprehension that you’d normally feel about going to a conference and being with people who perhaps you don’t know, they’re excited because they’re actually getting to physically meet people who they now consider to be actual companions.

The other thing that has gone down an absolute storm is the gamification of the site. So the fact that you can level up and earn badges and be rewarded for your sort of interaction with the site has been a huge hit. People get really competitive, people are always looking at leaderboards, and it kind of gives that hunger to want to be on it on a daily basis but also rewards you for being an engaged member of staff.”

Jo Mackie, Customer and People Director:

“So, people share photographs all the time, which means that we’ve now got this massive bank of photographs from different stores, and we’ve been able to use an awful lot of those around our office building to bring the stores into the office. So there’s that whole piece around seeing what’s going on in the business and connecting to that, and informal learning, because people are talking more about products, about service, they’re learning from that, and that’s a really nice byproduct of it, that it just increases the skill level and the capability of people in the business.”

Vikki Nye, Internal Comms Manager:

“We’re hugely spread out as a company, so over our 800 stores, we cover the whole of the UK and Ireland, and because of that, you end up with 12,000 people who kind of operate in maybe little silos and never really talk to one another. So MangoApps enables us to speak as one and to create friendships, and kind of, I guess, real key working relationships that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to establish, so collaboration is a really key one for us.

The other one for me that really resonates is the sharing of success and sharing of the good stuff that happens. So we’re just seeing lots of news about kind of someone who’s worked here for 45 years, and a picture being uploaded of them getting sort of presented with some flowers from their store manager, and stuff like that. And we’re getting lots of sort of things shared, like people who do sort of things in terms of corporate social responsibility, like charity efforts and stuff like that, stuff that you just wouldn’t see, so it’s always been happening, but you’ve never had an outlet to kind of share it and see it and congratulate people, wherever they are in the business.”

Emma Naylor, IT Project Manager:

“What I really love about it is being able to look at that information at any time and get onto the Hub at any time. Previous tools, we would’ve had to log on via our network and be in work while we’re doing it, but I can sit and look at that on a Saturday when I’m waiting for the kids to finish football, or… And I can see what people have been up to in the week and catch up, so I don’t feel like it’s a chore, really. It’s part of my sort of weekly activities. I think it’s a really good way to collaborate, so to build a CoLab and get the people involved into that CoLab to share ideas, best practice, and learnings, say from a store trial we might do. We could get all the store managers into a CoLab and get their feedback that way, rather than having to have them emailing us all separately, then they can all share together what they’ve found, learning-wise.”

David Bannister, Store Manager:

“I think it’s just catching up with everybody that you don’t necessarily work with on a day-to-day basis. It just puts you in instant communication with so many people, which is just really critical for my particular job role especially, where I have to be in touch with 10 stores at once at times, or be in touch with 70 members of staff at once, so it’s a great way just to get everybody in the one zone and just find out how they’re all doing, even if I’m not in the store. It’s getting their sort of good work put out there in public, and just being recognized for what they do, and not just waiting for somebody to come in and visit their stores and give them that feedback. They can actually shout about what they’re doing that particular day, or sort of celebrate successes when someone’s done particularly well. We can make the company aware of that particular person so that everyone knows about it, and not just the 10 people that may be working in the store that day.”

Vikki Nye, Internal Comms Manager:

“They’ve been incredibly helpful. Throughout the process, we have had a hell of a lot of kind of requirements, questions, and things that we needed to get kind of right before we launched, and nothing’s ever been a problem. Everything has been kind of understood. Anything that they were unable to do, they found a solution for, so we were never sort of told “No,” we were always told, “Maybe not that, but maybe this,” which is a great… It’s a great sort of way of working, because it means that you don’t hit barriers, you break them down and you find a route around it, which is really, really valuable. Particularly as well, I think that’s why our launch has been so successful, because we were able to make sure that any little bits that we felt we wanted to tweak or in some way manipulate so they worked really well for our business, we absolutely got that, and that’s why it’s landed so well in our culture and with our people.”

Emma Naylor, IT Project Manager:

“The beauty of the tool was we used the tool as our project tracking, which was great, and that constant instant feedback and updates, I’ve never had that. With other providers, you tend to have unwieldy issues logs, you have to have scheduled calls, et cetera. But with Mango, by using the tool, we could instantly communicate with you, and somebody always came back to us, even with time differences. That probably would’ve been my concern at the beginning, that there was time differences. Didn’t impact us at all, I don’t think.”

Jo Mackie, Customer and People Director:

“It is completely different to email, it’s not like email at all, and it’s more engaging, so that it’s easier to see a conversation in a thread, and we use it much more socially, so there’s conversations that happen on Mango that would just never have happened at all in the business on email.”

Vikki Nye, Internal Comms Manager:

“The predominant factor is on mobile, and the reason for that is probably the way in which our business is. So we have 12,000 users, but only 2,000 of those people are actually connected, in terms of only 2,000 people out of that pool of 12,000 actually have an email address, a corporate email address, so we heavily rely on the other people using it using their own personal mobile devices, so I think that leads to the nature of most of our traffic is from mobile. However, even our people who are connected with an email address and do sit at a desktop on their day-to-day basis do also have the app installed on their personal phones and use it in their personal time as well.”

David Bannister, Store Manager:

“People are so used to social media platforms now that emails are just not as impactful, they’re not as vibrant, they don’t have that same sort of message and tagging process. It can get a bit robotic, just sending emails back and forth, whereas the Hub allows us to be a little bit more interactive, and just a bit more modernized, I suppose. For me, it really, really helps sort of humanizing a job role that could be quite robotic at times, and we’re not just bosses pointing fingers, we’re actually here to support and share ideas and celebrate success, and the Hub’s a great way to do that. It just beats a text message or an email in that sense.”

Emma Naylor, IT Project Manager:

“Oh, I could tell them so much. It’s been a pleasure working with MangoApps from the very start. Everything we’ve asked for and everything we’ve dealt with you guys has been… Never been too much of a problem. I don’t think you’ve ever said “No” to us. You’ve always bent over backward, always given us really clear timescales on what you can deliver and when you can deliver it. You’re always fun and friendly, which is great for us, and I think when I spoke to… When we did our user case with one of your other customers, everything they said about you was what we were looking for, but also it came true. You delivered exactly what you said you would deliver.”

Andrew Cobb, IT Director:

“We’ve already been talking internally across our business units in the world about MangoApps, and we feel that it’s a great product for social and collaboration. So if somebody externally was to ask, I’d tell them what I’m telling our internal team, which is they should look at MangoApps to use this to create a modern and engaging social communication tool.”

Vikki Nye, Internal Comms Manager:

“So, I would say that MangoApps is great if your company has a culture around it where the people want to feel included, collaborative, engaging. If you want sort of that culture of honesty and feedback, then it’s the absolute perfect fit. It kind of does the social and the business together. There are elements to it that we haven’t even yet explored around how you can manage projects and things like that. But what I would say is whatever purpose you wanted it for, the MangoApps team would absolutely be happy to help you launch it in a way that fits you, rather than just kind of taking a product out of the box and you fitting it.”

David Bannister, Store Manager:

“I think they should absolutely get involved. It’s instantaneous, it’s rewarding, it’s exciting, and it’s easy to use.”

Vikki Nye, Internal Comms Manager:

“Interestingly enough, I think the only thing I would’ve done differently was not worried too much about how much I was going to have to push the product, because actually we launched it and people just used it. So I ended up with an entire communication plan for the first three months that was all around really pushing usage and trying to get people to adopt it, that I never even needed to use. I don’t think we could have picked a better vendor. Never in my time here have I seen something launch with so much positivity around it. People love it, and as far as I’m concerned, you couldn’t hope for more than that.”

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