Imagine you have 550 siblings, daughters and sons. Add best friends and acquaintances to the mix. Now imagine you want to get them all to sit down at the same breakfast table. Or for a nice cup of coffee now and then. Or generally just to sit down and talk on a regular basis. How’s that sister in Switzerland doing? What was daughter 137 celebrating the other day?
In the future, employees at large companies will be able to answer questions like these in the space of just a few minutes, thanks to the company’s own InfoHub. But what does an application like this need to do in order to deliver and manage business communications on time?
Distillation of all information into one single app
Hours of searching in e-mail inboxes, on the intranet or on websites is now a thing of the past! Simply log in and see all of the group’s announcements and changes on one platform – well sorted and easy to grasp at a single glance.
Improved relevance of messages thanks to a filter function
More than 550 family members and joint venture partners can quickly amass countless pieces of information. That’s why a sophisticated filter function, which allows a personalized representation of the user interface, is an absolute necessity. Ideally, the function will do this without losing focus on general but important messages.
Well informed and on time, through push notifications
What was that celebration that took place recently? When you ask yourself this question, it’s usually already too late. A brief message about when an event will take place is definitely an advantage in cases like these. That’s why push messages need to be triggered directly by the app as soon as a message is published. This ensures that everybody is immediately updated and – circumstances permitting – can even propose a live toast to daughter 137 to celebrate her anniversary. The additional bookmark function helps to ensure that no event is lost in the permanent flow of information.
New opportunities for corporate influencers
Sometimes there are messages that employees would like to pass on to their friends. For this purpose, subfunctions for preferred channels such as e-mail, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter should be implemented in the tool. This way, employees can easily become corporate influencers in their own company.
In the case of confidential company information, on the other hand, which must not leave the “family circle”, the sharing function should of course be deactivated.
Messages served in bite-sized chunks
The main appeal of the InfoHub, and a good reason why this form of information exchange is so readily accepted by many users, is the way information is prepared. All news is presented virtually on a silver platter, with content that can be grasped immediately with the help of expressive images, short headlines and teasers. The articles are best simply linked to the original source and/or can be downloaded as PDF files.
InfoHub at the Lufthansa Group
The international aviation group’s “InfoHubSales” platform, which went online in April 2018, was developed together with Plan.Net Connect – a subsidiary of the Serviceplan Group – especially for the sales department of Lufthansa Group Network Airlines. Since its global rollout in early 2019, the app has already become a big hit among Lufthansa Group sales staff.
For the further development of the InfoHubSales platform, Plan.Net Connect made use of the technological features of CMS system Contao. Regular updates, high functionality – also and especially when creating editorial content –, simple usability and control, social sharing options, stable performance, and worldwide availability: these were the most important factors when it came to choosing this system.
In addition, user behavior is constantly documented through permanent reporting in order to further increase the degree of personalized output.
Looking to the future
To ensure that every piece of information, however important, is preserved for future generations of large corporations, the communication platforms of today will become the knowledge databases of tomorrow. Digital reference works for company histories filled with technical developments and achievements are now in the process of being created. This way, even 50 years from now, everyone will still be able to read about what it was again that daughter 137 had to celebrate.
