Background

Verisure is an international security system company – and its business is booming. Present in 16 countries across Europe and South America, the company offers monitored security systems for homeowners and SMEs.

Having a Verisure system in your home or workplace is a huge deterrent to criminals. But if the worst happens, the high-tech devices that Verisure installs pick up movement and attempted entry. And if burglars actually enter a property, cameras and other devices click into action so that highly trained teams at Verisure’s alarm receiving centres can alert emergency services and manage the situation.

Verisure teams can talk directly to householders – and intruders. They can send video and stills to police. And in some systems, they can activate devices that prevent intruders from seeing anything, stopping them in their tracks.

The security systems can also be used to monitor vulnerable people in their homes. So if you haven’t heard from an elderly relative when you expected to, Verisure’s teams can use the cameras to check in – and call emergency services if needed.

The challenge

The highly professional levels of security and reassurance that Verisure offers families and business owners are what lies behind its rapid growth.

But as you grow, you need to take on more people – and you need to make sure that all your new colleagues know about their company, its brand, their colleagues and the work they’re achieving all over the world.

If you don’t, there is a danger that each territory will develop its own culture and own way of presenting products and services.

So as part of the company’s internal culture-building drive, they decided to launch an intranet – and they asked Wordtree to help them structure and populate it.

What we did

Working closely with the internal communications team, we worked to a top-level plan of everything the intranet should contain – and which information should be available to which teams.

Some information was great to share across the whole group – while other info (particularly legal, regulatory and other country-specific details), was more useful to share locally.

We then interviewed key stakeholders at the company’s headquarters in Geneva to extract all the information we needed to populate the intranet. This involved talking to individuals – and digesting all the various documents and resources they shared with us.

We then wrote the content, bearing in mind that it needed to be accessible – and that its consumers may not necessarily have English as a first language.

The whole process was tightly project managed, as individual teams fed back on their content and supplied additional information where required.

When the group-wide content was good to go, we also supported Verisure in writing news stories for the intranet – allowing the company to share updates, initiatives and best practice across its countries. And of course, the news content keeps colleagues across the world in touch with what’s happening in all of Verisure’s offices.

How Wordtree added value

Verisure does, of course, employ skilled brand, marketing, comms, internal comms and HR professionals. But there are a number of reasons any organisation might want to bring in external support for this kind of project. These can include:

• Resource – If it’s a large project and your in-house teams are already committed, then it can make sense to bring in external specialists. This was certainly the case for Verisure
• Expertise – Your in-house teams might be superb PR people, or brilliant marketing analysts and product developers, for example. But you may not have the exact combination of skills you need for specific projects. For this project, we were able to offer a combination of strategic, categorisation, project management, journalistic and writing for international audiences skills, all in one small team
• Perspective – It’s really common for in-house teams to become so close to their subject matter that it makes it difficult to see it from a customer’s point of view. This can be especially true the more technical and complex a product or service is
• Neutrality – Sometimes it can be difficult for people from one team to go and question their colleagues in another area of the business. So hiring skilled interviewers and writers to come in and do this for you can be practical for a number of reasons, including:
  • You are more likely to get rounded, impartial – and sometimes surprising – information out of the interview
  • You don’t have to demonstrate any level of understanding to colleagues – you have someone else to ask all the daft questions
  • Sometimes people are more willing to speak to an outsider than they are to a colleague

The ways we added most value to this project for Verisure were with resource and expertise.

Results

The intranet now means that core documents and general team information is close to hand. It also means that the Verisure story is widely understood – and retold – by the company’s thousands of employees, all across the world. This is whether they’re working in corporate offices, in alarm receiving centres – or whether they’re out on the road, working in sales, installation and maintenance.

Keen to learn more? Read about our approach to creating internal communications and check out our FAQs on copywriting.