Bettys & Taylors Group

Scattered content, limited reach, zero analytics 

Internal Communications Lead Tom Goodhand oversees a small internal comms team embedded across the Group. His remit spans setting comms strategy, managing the channel mix, and leading change communications: balancing the needs of a historic, Yorkshire-based tearoom and online retailer against the demands of an international tea brand achieving rapid growth.

Bettys and Taylors had no single platform that met the needs of its entire workforce. The company’s intranet was a static HTML page: beige and grey, no search function, no analytics, and no way to update content raising an IT ticket. The only method for making content prominent was what Tom calls “corner flashes”: on-page call-outs that had a capacity of two before the space ran out.  

Critically, nothing could be accessed off-site or on any device other than desktop . If you worked in operations—on a tea production line, in a cafe kitchen, in a bakery—you had to stop what you were doing and access a work computer on the company network to find anything. Policies mainly lived in  printed employee handbooks. Documents were scattered across SharePoint sites, WordPress blogs, and that legacy HTML page. There was no way of knowing what had been updated, what was obsolete, or what anyone was actually reading.  

When COVID hit, the team rapidly deployed a lightweight employee communications app. It served its purpose—keeping furloughed, remote, and on-site workers connected—but it was built for social and news only. It couldn’t house documents or policies, couldn’t integrate with SSO, and had been set up with personal email accounts, creating an administrative burden to remove leavers, and add new starters, and with no way to enforce password standards. The security team had tolerated this during the emergency, but it wasn’t sustainable.  

“We got the highly engaged people coming back, the disengaged people remaining disengaged. If you didn’t want to read people’s nice stories, there was no reason to go on.”

Security, search, and a realistic demo  

When the previous platform’s contract ended, Tom led a six-month tender process, evaluating six or seven vendors, a mix of SharePoint overlay products and standalone platforms. The must-haves were non-negotiable: an elegant news feed, rigorous information security compliance including SSO integration, robust document management with expiration tracking, powerful search, a mobile app, and the ability to target and personalize content by role, location, and department.  

Interact stood out on several fronts. It successfully answered every information security check, winning the security team’s backing. The ClearBox Consulting vendor guide ranked Interact strongly. The cost was competitive. And, importantly, the demos were realistic.  

“We had some mock-ups from vendors which looked lovely, but when you scratched behind it, it was very highlycustomised. The stuff Interact showed was realistic — we could see how it was put together and how we would replicate it ourselves.”

The product roadmap also mattered. Tom’s team could see the direction of travel—from the HTML editor to the block editor and beyond—and that gave them confidence they were buying into a platform that wouldn’t stagnate.  

Challenging, satisfying, and well-supported  

Tom is candid about the implementation: clearing over a decade of scattered, unowned content was painful. There were documents untouched for ten years with no named owner, multiple links to different versions of the same customer portal, and no analytics to indicate what was still in use. But the process was also deeply satisfying—a long-overdue spring clean that meant the new platform would start life organised and purposeful.  

The Interact team provided extensive build support, helping design the information architecture, migrating legacy content, working through design and branding with Bettys and Taylors’ in-house designer, advising on launch strategy based on experience with other customers, and even rebuilding content natively when a SharePoint connector proved to be unworkable. 

“The team at Interact have gone through multiple intranet launches over the years. Why would you not lean on that expertise rather than assuming you know what’s best?”

From digital signage to AI Search

Today, the Group proudly manages a holistic, all-in-one employee experience platform, named Exchange. It is a comprehensive platform spanning multiple Interact features.  

Digital signage drives awareness for frontline workers who may not log in daily—screens at all seven sites show content ranging from promoted intranet pages to short subtitled leadership videos. In a crisis, the team can instantly take over screens and push a single urgent message, supported by the broadcast banner tool and a separate text alert service.  

The email newsletter tool, turned on around six months ago, delivers a weekly roundup and targeted communications to specific audiences, including line managers, and an emerging financial wellbeing list.  

Pulse surveys and homepage polls give the comms team a quick read on everything from how financial results communications were received to what people are most looking forward to at Easter.  

More recently, the team has been adopting AI features. AI search is increasingly useful for surfacing answers from long policy documents, and Tom has been tweaking the language and tone settings to match the company’s voice. The team has just joined the beta for Ask Analytics, and they attend every quarterly product launch to plan ahead for new capabilities. 

How AI Search has changed the world’s best workplaces:

• Power users reduced their search time by 30% to achieve the same work 
• New users increased their search activity by 121% 
• 71% positive feedback on all natural language and questions and queries  
• 66% customers running regular AI Search queries within one week of onboarding 

Discover what AI Search can do for your organization right now.

Reach, search, and evidence of a platform people actually use 

With no analytics before Interact, Tom can’t draw before-and-after comparisons. But the data the platform now provides tells a clear story of adoption and utility.  

In a single month window, almost 80% of users accessed the Exchange. In the six months since the company launched its new SAP Concur HR and payroll system via the platform, unique users exceed the total headcount, accounting for leavers and joiners during the period – revealing an effecting 100% reach. 

Search tells an even more striking story. In the same one month period,, users performed 46,500 searches, and 74% of all users have used the search function, averaging nine searches per day, with just 1.1 clicks needed to reach the content they’re looking for.  

Before Interact, finding a policy could mean half an hour of clicking through files with no idea where to start. Now they’re finding what they need in a fraction of the time: searching less but achieving more. 

“People are searching a huge amount and they’re almost always finding what they need pretty much straight away. To me, that’s a massive success.”  

The annual comms pulse survey reinforces this. On a seven-point scale, employees rate quality of internal comms at 5.2, how well informed they feel at 5.1, and relevance at 5.0.  

 When asked about volume, 66% of respondents answered “about right”—a sweet spot Tom’s team works hard to maintain through content targeting and audience segmentation. The Exchange is rated the most useful comms channel across almost all teams.  

“The Exchange isratedthe most useful comms channel acrossalmost allteams.”

The Exchange has also delivered on Betty and Taylors’ compliance needs. The information security policy is the fifth most-read page of all time, and the acceptable use policy is eighth. In a climate where businesses like M&S have suffered major cyber incidents, having governance documentation that’s both easy to find and simple to verify as current carries real risk-avoidance value.  

The induction rebuild stands out. New starters now land on a personalised homepage for their first 30 days, with a structured journey from day one through to month three: what to do, what to see, what to read, with guidance for discussion and reflection points between managers and new starters. It replaced a process that relied on managers reading PDFs aloud in meeting rooms. The feedback has been strong—people land in the business faster and become self-sufficient sooner.

Career pathway pages are another win. Using structured pages on the Exchange, the team has built navigable routes through different roles and departments, helping employees see what a different roles look like or what skills or experience they’d need to progress. It’s material that always existed in job descriptions but was never accessible or navigable before.

And then there’s the shareholder community. Bettys and Taylors’ family shareholders — eight people — previously received a printed quarterly newsletter. Now they have their own gated community on the Exchange, receiving content securely and in real time, and with simple processes in place for the comms team to replicate and edit content initially designed for employees.

“The Exchange is a game changer. Having just returned to the business from a time we didn’t have it, it’s such an amazing improvement from over five years ago. It’s been a vital tool for me as a new starter.”  

“The Exchange is brilliant, easily searchable, one-stop shop for information, all things Bettys & Taylors, and frankly, I’m not sure how we survived without it.”  

“I love being able to hear news about what is happening in the wider company, particularly good news stories like positive feedback from customers. It makes me feel very happy to work here.”  

“Working nights, we sometimes miss things, so having the info on the screen while having a break is fantastic.”  

Tom’s next focus is the mobile experience for frontline audiences. The data shows which teams and locations access the Exchange less frequently, and the team plans to investigate what content would make it more relevant to them. The approach will be targeted: testing with specific departments before rolling out more broadly.  

On the partnership, Tom describes it simply: it works. The CSM relationship is responsive and proactive. The quarterly product launches help the team plan ahead and adjust their comms calendar around incoming features rather than doubling work. And the in-person customer events remain the most valuable forum — seeing how other organisations use the same platform sparks ideas that are immediately actionable.  

“It feels like Interact isn’t sitting still at all. It’s constantly looking at how to improve, bring improvements that maybe we didn’t know we needed, but when we see them, they’re really useful.”