De Lijn Launches Highly Responsive Website, Reinforces Digital B2C Presence

The Situation

CXOs globally are struggling to make digital a core part of how they do business and serve their customers. Enterprises the world over are realizing the pressing need to spur their journey toward digital excellence.

Vlaamse Vervoersmaatschappij De Lijn—popularly known as De Lijn—an independent public transport company providing bus and tram services in the Flemish region, owns one of the most visited sites in Belgium (up to 100,000 page views per hour under special circumstances). To support their ever-growing customer base and to exceed the needs and expectations of their customers, De Lijn identified the urgency to implement a new online strategy—the biggest challenge of which was to relaunch their website by connecting all their existing and new information channels and functionalities.

At the top of the priority list of features of the new De Lijn website was screen responsiveness—the website needed to be responsive to deliver a customized view across platforms and devices. Furthermore, the site needed to be integrated with other systems containing relevant data. This was crucial as the real-time data presented to the end-users had to be gathered from multiple backend systems. Thus, the new De Lijn website was required to demonstrate high performance and was to be a reliable integration point for all relevant travel information.

The Solution

De Lijn signed on Capgemini’s Digital Customer Experience (DCX) team to lead and deliver this project. Capgemini was engaged mainly for four critical reasons—our proven project approach and planning ability, the competence of our project team,our project governance model, and our capability to align with the documentation standards of De Lijn.

DCX is a response to customer needs to utilize enhanced opportunities that address market shifts and consume digital services intelligently in order to increase business performance. Through DCX, Capgemini helps customers draw closer to their endusers in order to deliver a superlative multichannel experience.

The Capgemini team chose Tridion as the content management platform, as it was optimized to deliver a contextual experience and drive an enhanced user experience for the customers of a website as frequented as that of De Lijn. As the first step in the project, two Java applications were designed and programmed—the website and an API application. The website was designed as a standalone Java application that dynamically merged marketing content with real-time information from backend systems. The API application was programmed to service the backend systems in a cleaner way—combining multiple technical services into one functional service—and add caching capabilities to improve performance.

The project was handled in a phase-wise manner. At the outset, the Capgemini DCX team simultaneously focused on two parallel tracks—functional analysis and architecture. Capgemini collaborated with the team from De Lijn over several workshops to focalize on Agile as the most appropriate approach to refine the website’s functional analysis and architecture. The progress was constantly tracked using the Capgemini JIRA as a Service platform.

Thereafter, the team shifted focus to technical analysis. To effectively integrate the website with De Lijn’s backend systems, Capgemini performed a detailed analysis to identify the services that could provide relevant information and validated the quality of the data provided by these services. This step was crucial to the success of the project.

The Result

A preview version of the website was published within seven months of project commencement and the final version was made live a month thereafter. The revamped website has a fresh design, easy-to-use navigation capabilities, improved functionality, enhanced performance, augmented accessibility of information, upgraded screen responsiveness, and flawless integration.

The website was well-received among customers and stakeholders and acknowledged with excellent feedback on social media since its launch.

The outcome was appreciated by Tom Van De Vreken, spokesperson of De Lijn. In his words, “In terms of user friendliness, this is one of the best websites you will find in the Belgian public sector. Our nomination for the prestigious E-Gov awards is enough proof of this.”

How De Lijn and Capgemini Work Together

Capgemini collaborated with De Lijn’s external vendor that provided the product and installed TMS—a translation module that is used by De Lijn—planned their interventions, and ensured that they fitted in with the global planning of the project. Furthermore, Capgemini collaborated with one of De Lijn’s subcontractors to ensure seamless delivery of the HTML/CSS for the website, thereby ‘unburdening’ De Lijn from having to deal with the related deadlines and the bug-fixing afterwards. Capgemini maintained direct contact with the vendor and kept De Lijn updated about the progress. Thus, by perfectly understanding the needs of De Lijn and aligning the project to the overall business strategy, Capgemini integrated all relevant information and technologies to develop a single, responsive interface for their customers and supported De Lijn in achieving success in their digital transformation journey.