Bachelor | External Learning Activity | Sep ’19 – Jan ’20
INTERNSHIP NS
Course
External Learning Activity
Team
Customer Experience (CX)
Coaching
Pauline Bron (NS)
Izabela Boloz (TU/e)
During my B3.1 semester I had the opportunity to be an intern at NS, the Dutch railways, where I was part of the Customer Experience team. A very diverse team with different expertises that work together to make the journey of the traveler and employee as good of an experience as possible.
Over the course of 19 weeks, I have worked on a large variety of projects. From design sprints to hospitality and customer experience, from creating personas and customer journeys to doing research.
Design Sprints
One of my main learning points during my internships was how to set up design sprints. I learned what techniques are applied in which phase of the design process and why.
Throughout my internship I was involved in multiple design sprints. In some I took an organizing role, in others I participated myself. This allowed me to experience the different perspectives.
Communication
Due to my background I was often asked to visualize processes and outcomes as a means of communication. This helped my colleagues express their ideas or processes to others. The visualizations assisted in telling the story without it being boring or difficult to understand. This way I got to practice targeting my visuals to the audience in a way they understand it quickly.
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Experiencing the different perspectives of the user's journey
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Stimulating personal announcements instead of automatic announcements
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User testing applications to improve the traveler's experience
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Responsibilities within the Customer Experience Department
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Design Sprint on improving the waiting experience during disturbances
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Concept creation and visualisation as a result from the design sprint
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Persona creation of involved stakeholders
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Customer journey of one of the personas
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Mapping the persona's goals, needs and touchpoints to discover painpoints
Design Sprints
NS Design Sprints
Design thinking is a relatively new method within NS. The way the method is applied here, can be decribed in roughly 3 phases.
1. It always starts with a research phase, where qualitative and quantitative research is conducted in order to define the problem.
2. The design sprint itself, where a multidisciplinairy group of people create personas, journeys, brainstorm, ideate and create concepts. Within the sprint, the double diamond principle is applied.
3. A thrid phase where the concepts are built into minimum viable products or systems, and thoroughly tested.
NS Flex
This design sprint focused on the experience of new customers purchasing a Flex subscription. I was involved in the last phase of the sprint, where an A/B test and userstudies were conducted to test the UX of the new service developed in the earlier phase of the design process.
Unplanned disruptions
The goal of this design sprint was to improve the waiting experience of the travelers during an unplanned disruption. In multidisciplinary teams, we created customer journeys, personas and service blueprints of various scenarios. Also multiple ideation sessions took place, where we used multiple brainstorm methods to come up with creative ideas to improve the waiting experience.
NS Business Cards
The customer experience of purchasing business cards for a company needed improvement. I was involved in the starting phase of the sprint, where the focus lied on research and gaining insights into the needs and current journey of the customer. A customer journey map was used to map all these insights and touchpoints. I was also responsible for communicating the complexity of the problem through an animated customer journey.
Switching to NS Flex
This design sprint built on the NS Flex sprint, this time focusing on the switching to NS Flex as opposed to being a new customer. I was again involved in the starting phase of the sprint, and responsible for communicating the complexity of the problem through an animated customer journey.