Finance | SharePoint and Digital Workplace
The Phoenix Group was founded in 1857 as the Pearl Loan Company, and today is the UK's largest long-term savings and retirement business. The group's various firms specialise in the management and acquisition of closed life and pension funds, and include Phoenix (Life & Life Assurance), Phoenix Wealth, Standard Life, ReAssure, and SunLife. These businesses collectively hold 13 million customers, £300 billion of assets under administration and a 166% shareholder capital coverage ratio as of June 2021. The Phoenix Group came to ClerksWell due to our expertise and proven track record in bespoke front-end builds. They wanted to display their SharePoint web content without SharePoint's visual restrictions.
The Phoenix Group wanted their content on multiple pages of their SharePoint site, without the rigid design restrictions of the CMS. However, they still wished to retain the strong management abilities, ease of use and familiarity that SharePoint offered them.
The challenge, therefore, was to build a 'hub' on top of SharePoint's core features, to solve their problem of a rigid and restrictive front-end, without damaging the back-end, which was fully functioning and pleasing to the client.
ClerksWell suggested a hub build as the best solution for The Phoenix Group's challenges. Thus we began this project by building three separate hub applications, drawing content from the SharePoint API. These applications serviced the content from the SharePoint CMS in a way that was far more dynamic, exciting, and personalised than SharePoint's native infrastructure restrictions allow for.
These elements presented in the forms of 'hub tiles' for increased functionality and custom layouts to offer The Phoenix Group greater control over their content. The team at ClerksWell also developed a custom alerts system for recent publications, meaning that The Phoenix Group could change labels, alert images, notification frequency and more to minimise their dependency on a supplier.
This solution provided The Phoenix Group with fresh, exciting and customisable designs for their original content. The hubs that ClerksWell created ensured a scalable environment for The Phoenix Group that covered all their companies, generating a digital workplace that expanded at the same rate as their business.
The approach taken by ClerksWell not only matched the client's vision for their digital workplace, but also provided them with a distinct tailor-made editorial interface, enabling content authoring and regular content updates to be developed by Phoenix themselves, with minimum training.
90%
adoption in 48 hours
60%
of news content created by the business
2x
increase in article engagement
20%
of daily news shared via micro-posts
Beyond headline figures, behaviour changed. Staff now share knowledge peer‑to‑peer, moving away from a centralised “command and control” communications model. Engagement expanded into conversation and ownership, with 10% of staff contributing to discussion forums and 20 employees creating and maintaining their own blogs.
“It was my pleasure to present the ‘Best Intranet’ award… I gave high marks for innovation, as the intranet developed for Phoenix Group was directly integrated into Windows 10.”
Judge’s comments, Digital Impact Awards
