Case Study: TUI Improving NPS During Business Transition

TUI Group is a multinational travel and tourism company, encompassing well-known brands such as Thomson and First Choice. The group includes travel agencies, hotels, airlines and cruise liners, with this empire making them the largest leisure, travel and tourism company in the world.

The Challenge

TUI needed to improve its contact centre Net Promoter Score (NPS) and increase customer feedback response rates. The customer feedback process was very labour intensive and a lack of real time data was affecting their ability to resolve customer issues and improve customer satisfaction. There was also confusion over which part of the business the customer’s query had come from i.e. travel, weddings, cruises.

The Solution

Changing their Voice of Customer solution to Bright Navigator fundamentally changed the way they survey customers.  Bright’s contact centre experts trained the team on how to use the system and how to interpret the results. TUI is now surveying customers every two hours. Agents, team leaders and management all have access to real time information to enable them to take immediate corrective action.

The Results

In just under 12 months, TUI improved contact centre NPS from 3.8 to 41.6. Customer Effort rose from 56% to 76%, General Satisfaction from 64% to 79%, Knowledge from 67% to 82% and Contact Resolution from 67% to 80%. TUI has the data to understand where to improve contact centre performance, and the contact centre is influencing process and policy improvements elsewhere in the business with evidence.

Transitional challenges

The business had made the decision to close one of their main contact centres in Coventry, and transition it to Swansea, where they had one small contact centre. The existing centre in Swansea went through rapid changes, including a new building to accommodate the increase from 40 full-time staff to approximately 200 full-time staff.

The operating model in Coventry and Swansea at the time was a siloed approach, with small teams dealing with very specific customer query types. Whilst establishing their new main contact centre, TUI decided to implement a target-operating model, based on best practice. This would completely change how they deal with customers, with tier one being high volume simple queries, and tier two being low volume complex queries.

The team knew that there was a problem with the customer experience, but there was very little evidence to fully understand what the problems were. NPS was just 3.8.

Finding the solution

Customer feedback was, at the time, being fed through their central CRM function and involved a very manual process for the CRM team of extracting and cleansing the data once a month and sending out customer surveys via email for which that had two weeks to respond. At the end of the two weeks, results would go back to the CRM team who would have to manually manipulate and cleanse the data to put it into a useable format to send over to the Contact Centre Solutions team to analyse.

The problems with this process were that if the email hadn’t been captured in the call, they weren’t able to survey them, and a delay of up to two months getting visibility of any useful data. By the time they had this data, there was confusion over which real time issues were still outstanding or resolved, and survey response rates were just 5%. As a customer, you might have to wait a month until you received any follow up.

For TUI, this wasn’t good enough and the Contact Centre Solutions team knew they needed a solution that meant they didn’t have to rely on the CRM team for data manipulation.

Rachel Gregory, Contact Centre Solutions Manager, explains their decision process: “Having worked with Bright at a previous company, I had confidence in the business and their solution. One of the big features that set Bright Navigator apart from similar tools on the market, was that our advisors would have their own logins and could see when surveys were coming back and what their individual scores were, meaning they could act on any issues straight away. This is a great form of self-development for them and one of the bonuses of having real-time feedback at our fingertips.”

Understanding the problems and knowing what to do about them

“With Bright Navigator, we now survey our clients daily,” explains Rachel. “Bright gave us intensive training on how to interpret the comprehensive analysis and reports that the solution provides. And if we have any queries on the results, the contact centre experts at Bright are always there to help us make sense of what we are seeing, and support us in recommending an approach to respond.”

With a much more solid approach to customer feedback, the business has got much more useful data to analyse, enabling them to see what query type is causing issues and implementing actions to resolve these problems.

“Changing the way we survey has been a game changer for us. It’s given us more specific focus areas and we’ve been able to see issues that we would never have known about before”, explains Lisa Steele, Director of Customer Contact .

“We are able to use the data to support our agents better. Team Managers now have the ammunition to focus their coaching. And the agents can see how they are performing every day; giving them the insight to improve the experience they deliver.”

As well as their main contact centre in Swansea, TUI also outsourced some of their calls to a partner in India. One of the issues that was highlighted through the verbatim comments left through Bright Navigator was repeated feedback from customers that there was a language barrier. This information supported the business’ decision to move their outsourced contact centre from India to South Africa. This move has resulted in comments regarding communication problems significantly reducing now that customer interactions with South Africa are now being surveyed.

Bright future

With Bright Navigator in place, TUI now have surveys being sent out every two hours to customers and they have already seen survey response rates more than double from 5% to 12% in less than 12 months. As well as this impressive result, NPS has jumped from 3.8 to 41.6 with promoters increasing from 44% to 63%, and detractors have decreased from 39% to 21%.

TUI is now able to see the impact transitions and changes made in the contact centre, or in products, processes and policies elsewhere in the business are having on customers. With this information available in real-time, they can resolve any issues, such as knowledge of new advisors quickly. This is something they never would have been able to do as the data would have been 6 weeks out of date by the time it reached them.

“The more we got to know the people at Bright, the more we knew we had made the right choice. There was real collaboration between us, as opposed to just a supplier transactional relationship. We know we can call the team anytime if we have any questions and that they will do anything they can to help. They have so much knowledge to share and time to give, which is something I personally really value.”

“I really felt they went above and beyond in the first few months and were really hands on, whether it was helping us interpret the survey data, or walking us through the portal and what everything meant. They created relevant monthly reports for us at the start whilst our team was getting up to speed. We’ve been given amazing insight into our business which ultimately, has enabled us to improve the customer experience, which is what it’s all about for us”, said Rachel.

“Looking forward, we are looking at how we can expand our use of Bright solutions to further improve the customer experience. Bright Employee will help us develop our people to continue to improve on the results we are seeing in the customer experience.”

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