How one organisation made intranet information 53% faster to find
Faced with an intranet that had evolved into a sprawling collection of more than 3,000 content pages maintained by a decentralised authoring community of 700 contributors, this anonymous New Zealand-based financial organisation needed a better way to help frontline teams find the information they depend upon to support customers quickly and confidently.
Many intranet content pages were long, inconsistent and difficult to navigate, with some single pages taking more than 30 minutes to read.
To address the problem, the internal communications team launched a pilot program combining content restructuring based on guidelines with AI assisted authoring using Copilot.
Breaking long pages into dozens of smaller ones
One of the first test pages in the pilot program was a large, single page with dense information that took about 30 minutes to read.
“In the case of one that I tackled, it was essentially all contained on one page… it might take 30 minutes to read,” said the organisation’s Intranet Manager.
“We broke it down into a dozen separate pages.”
This redesign aimed to make content more digestible, more task focused, and easier for busy frontline staff to scan.
Giving authors Copilot + clear guidelines
The internal comms team also documented clear writing guidelines with headings, bullet points, short paragraphs, active voice and direct, task focused language, and fed these into Copilot alongside page templates.
Content page authors can then generate draft pages quickly and ask Copilot to refine them against the guidelines.
“Copilot spits out a draft, then we get it to immediately refine the draft against the guidelines again. That usually gets us a pretty decent output,” the Intranet Manager said.
This results in higher‑quality content created in minutes rather than hours, with subject matter experts still reviewing the content for accuracy.
Testing the impact
The team then ran controlled testing with frontline staff, measuring their ability to find answers using both the old and new versions of the content.
The results were clear: “It was 53% faster to find the information through the new content,” the Intranet Manager said.
Colleagues also found the redesigned pages easier to navigate and had stronger confidence in the results they found.
Setting the stage for AI chatbots and saving hours
This cleaner, better structured content also supports future chatbot capabilities. By reducing duplication and standardising language, the organisation is improving the grounding of AI responses. This helps in reducing hallucinations and giving more consistent responses.
This pilot ensures the foundation is strong before scaling AI across the 3,000 intranet content pages.
By putting these measures in place to reduce the time spent searching for answers on the intranet, this NZ organisation is reducing productivity waste and better supporting customers.
Data from SWOOP Analytics has been key in supporting the program.
“We primarily used SWOOP Analytics’ Search Terms report and Content reports (Pages and Files) in the Audience dashboard so we could export and understand what our specific target business areas were searching for and using across the intranet,” the Intranet Manager said.
“The data has helped us pinpoint the content that different teams are using and searching for, so we can prioritise high value content first.
“The pilot has helped show the value of improving our content, and that we can’t just roll out a chat bot that's going to magically fix all these problems… we need to do some of the hard work as well.”
A top performer in SWOOP Analytics’ benchmarking
The work this organisation is putting in place is paying off. Not only are employees saving time by finding information faster, but the organisation boasts one of the top spots in SWOOP Analytics’ 2026 global benchmarking analysis.
This financial organisation ranked No.6 in the world from the 41 organisation analysed, and boasted a Quality score in top three. The Quality score takes into account spelling errors, broken links, content age etc.
Moving forward, after the successful pilot program to restructure intranet pages across four major topic areas, the organisation plans to:
Roll out the new guidelines more broadly
Reduce the authoring community from the current 700, to improve consistency
Continue using Copilot to speed up content creation
Prepare content for a broader rollout of AI chatbots.
