Moreover Technologies – Company Blog

We’re pleased and proud to share a great customer success story with you – we’re pleased because the customer is pleased, and we’re pleased because we can tell you about it. We’ll be even more pleased when we repeat the success at other organisations looking for similar solutions to those of Royal Dutch Shell. 

The customer case study is on our website, but it’s printed below in full as well - as you can appreciate this is a pretty good story for us to tell, so please forgive us this slightly vanglorious customer case study post!

Customer Case Study: How Newsdesk helped Shell save $5 million

A customer case study of Moreover’s Newsdesk implementation across the corporate intranet of Royal Dutch Shell, and how they saved $5 million over two years by consolidating several media monitoring contracts with external agencies under Moreover as a single vendor.

The Shell Project – Introduction

In spring of 2006 Shell approached Moreover for a new project, the aims of which were two-fold: provide Shell employees with access to personalised news and business information directly from the intranet and secondly, find a solution to help consolidate the myriad of media monitoring contracts that had spawned across all the different offices and locations over time.

Two requirements stood out: the technical capability to deliver and integrate with Shell’s IT environment, plus extensive coverage of international news across the many languages needed by a global corporation. Delivery of service started in the autumn of that year and has progressed in close partnership ever since. In the process Shell has become one of Moreover’s largest customers.

Intranet-wide News Portal for all employees

Over time the project has developed and expanded. As part of an intranet re-design, Moreover’s Newsdesk was embedded within the Shell online portal as a key component, providing Shell’s employees with access to real-time news and blogs directly from the intranet – thanks to integration with Microsoft’s ActiveDirectory there are no additional login requirements for users.

In fact, employees on the intranet don’t even realise that they are using an externally provided service. When they click the News tab on the intranet, they go straight through to a Shell-branded version of Newsdesk, where they can search for news, retrieve saved feeds, set up email alerts and read feeds and headlines set up by central office. As part of a custom implementation for Shell, users can also search across internal company content through the portal.

Rossen Roussev, Head of External Intelligence at Shell who has led the project on their side, puts it as follows: “Usage of Moreover’s Newsdesk and its content has been quite phenomenal, with users accessing thousands of articles on a daily basis. The combination of excellent content, easy-to-use interface and full integration with our intranet were key to acceptance with minimal effort required for change management and end-user training.”

Media monitoring for marketing and business intelligence

The other half of the Moreover-Shell project has been to provide Shell’s marketing and business intelligence teams with a media monitoring service, to help them manage the global tide of online news. For example, Shell uses Moreover to track and respond to news about the company and its subsidiaries, to monitor local operations and political developments, to read up on the industry and other companies and to track developments in technology, science and the environment.

Creating these targeted news channels takes editorial intelligence and expertise. “Having access to so much content at your fingertips requires a careful consideration of the topics and issues we wanted to expose to our readers”, says Rossen. “User’s confidence can be easily lost if you’re tracking a issue critical to Shell and your tailored feed has captured an irrelevant article. Moreover’s Editorial and Customer Services teams have been a major factor in ensuring this was a success and minimising the risk factors of running this in a fully automated manner.”

Consolidated media monitoring saves $5 million in two years

In the process, Shell was able to target and replace a number of existing media monitoring contracts and consolidate under a single provider. This has produced real, measurable bottom-line impact and has proven the service. Rossen states it clearly: “Utilising Moreover’s Newsdesk, we’ve been able to stop and consolidate a number of contracts with external agencies providing media monitoring for us. $4mln saved and another $1mln avoided in a single year – do I need to say more?!”

The road ahead

Today the work continues. Shell’s business requirements provide a great blueprint for the wider market opportunity for this type of service. Their product feedback has been hugely valuable to the product and engineering teams at Moreover. For instance, new features such as the recently introduced analytics, the upcoming newsletter and the improved email alerts service all incorporate feedback from Shell.

The challenges continue too of course, with intranets developing apace, driven forward by Web 2.0 technologies and expectations. Moreover’s long-term design on enterprise services and its commitment to Shell and its many other global clients create an excellent position from which to take advantage of the ever-evolving opportunities in this sector. These are challenging but also hugely exciting times, and Moreover is looking forward to working with Rossen and his team in the years ahead and to sharing future successes with other great companies and teams to come.

Moreover Sales and Further Details

To discuss how Moreover can save your organisation money or to find out more about our products and services, please contact the Moreover Sales department on the following details: