Building a Vendor-Ready Website Strategy and RFP for a Swiss Government Transport Operator

About the Project:

CGN (Compagnie Générale de Navigation) is a Swiss government-owned ferry operator on Lake Geneva, connecting communities and visitors across one of Europe's most iconic lakes. Operating within a government-linked network, CGN serves a diverse audience, from daily commuters and regional residents to tourists exploring the Léman region.

After more than a year of planning a full website overhaul, including an unsuccessful engagement with a previous agency, CGN needed more than good intentions. They needed a clear, fundable brief and a price they could finally act on. KARL Mission was brought in to cut through the complexity, move fast, and deliver a complete, vendor-ready strategy from the ground up.

‍

Mission:

Our mission was to run rapid, in-person discovery across every department and translate the operational reality of a public transport operator into a comprehensive, actionable website brief.

We aimed to:

• Conduct structured discovery interviews and workshops on site to capture how the business actually works, not just how it looks from the outside.
• Untangle the technical and governance complexity of a government-linked transport network, far removed from a standard tourism brand.
• Produce a complete, vendor-ready RFP and pricing structure that could finally unblock a project that had stalled for over a year.

‍

Process:

To ensure every deliverable was grounded in real operational insight and stakeholder alignment, we ran a series of on-site interviews, technical workshops, audits, and research streams across four intensive days and beyond.

‍

1. On-Site Interviews Across Every Department: We travelled to CGN and spent four days interviewing staff across the full organization: support teams, ticket counter cashiers, sales agents, and the digital team. This gave us a ground-level understanding of how CGN's operations translate into digital needs, and surfaced the undocumented business rules and workflow gaps that had been blocking progress.

‍

2. Technical and Governance Workshops: We mapped CGN's full systems landscape, covering integrations with Scheidt & Bachmann, NOVA, Magento, Synthese, and Saferpay. These sessions revealed the real complexity sitting beneath the surface: interdependencies, legacy constraints, and governance considerations that any incoming vendor would need to navigate.

‍

3. Strategic Findings and Risk Report: From our discovery work, we produced a strategic risk report naming the real blockers: absent business rule documentation, undocumented user journeys, and unclear pricing logic. Surfacing these early meant the eventual brief could address them directly, rather than passing ambiguity down to vendors.

‍

4. Persona Workshop: We developed nine validated personas across five segments: Lemanique, Touriste, Pendulaire, Passionné, and Entreprise, covering the full range of CGN's audiences, from daily lake commuters to leisure travellers and corporate clients. These personas grounded every functional and UX requirement in real user needs.

‍

5. Sales Tool Specification Review: We audited CGN's sales tool requirements across seven identified gaps: API architecture, ERP and back-office integration, inventory management, user roles, reporting and KPIs, loyalty functionality, and POS interface. This ensured the RFP captured the full transactional and operational scope, not just the front-end experience.

‍

6. Analytics and Data Privacy Audit: We reviewed CGN's full analytics stack, including Google Tag Manager, Matomo, GA4, LinkedIn Insight Tag, Meta Pixel, and AB Tasty, and identified a significant compliance gap in cookie consent handling under both GDPR and the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP). Recommendations were integrated into the brief to ensure the new site would launch compliant from day one.

‍

7. Competitor Benchmark: We conducted a section-by-section competitor benchmark, comparing CGN's digital experience against ferry operators and tourism brands across homepage and navigation, booking flow, content strategy, and mobile experience. This identified the strongest practices in the space and set a clear bar for the redesign.

‍

8. Email Competitor Benchmark: We reviewed competitor email communications, including booking confirmations, reminders, and newsletters, to benchmark CGN's future transactional and marketing email strategy against best-in-class operators. Findings directly informed the email requirements within the RFP.

‍

9. SEO Audit and Benchmark: We performed a full technical and content SEO audit, paired with a competitive SEO benchmark. Findings fed directly into the CDC's content, metadata, and multilingual requirements, ensuring SEO performance was built into the brief rather than bolted on later.

‍

10. Functionality and Requirements Matrix: Every requirement in the CDC was translated into a structured scoring matrix for vendor evaluation, organized across four workstreams: Avant-vente, Vente, Après-vente, and Exigences techniques. This gave CGN a practical tool for comparing proposals on a like-for-like basis.

‍

Solution:

The result was a complete website brief and RFP package, a rigorous, vendor-ready document that defined every component of CGN's new digital platform and gave the project the structure it needed to move forward with confidence.

The final deliverable included:

• A clear project context, objectives, and scope.
• A full audit of the existing site and systems landscape.
• Nine validated personas across five audience segments.
• A complete functional specification covering API Gateway architecture, CMS requirements, transactional messaging, and UX and design direction.
• Technical and hosting requirements tailored to CGN's government-linked infrastructure.
• A trackable features and requirements matrix for vendor scoring across all workstreams.
• Section-by-section competitor benchmark, dedicated email benchmark, and technical and competitive SEO audit.
• An Agile project framework with pricing structured by workstream.
• Supporting documentation from every interview, workshop, and audit conducted on site.

Conclusion:

By embedding ourselves in CGN's operations, literally on site across every department, KARL Mission was able to do what a year of planning had not: produce a complete, credible, fundable brief that vendors could act on immediately. The resulting RFP gives CGN a clear path forward for a website redesign that reflects the true complexity of their network and the real diversity of their audiences.

‍

Ready to Transform Your Digital Presence?

Whether you're preparing an RFP, redesigning your website, or aligning teams around a shared vision, KARL Mission can help you plan, optimize, and execute your next digital transformation. Book a free consultation today.