Flight Centre Canada case study | Feefo

Introduction

Flight Centre Travel Group is one of Canada’s largest travel retailers and it’s headquartered in Toronto and Vancouver. It has locations and agents across Ontario and British Columbia that support multiple travel brands and focuses on the leisure, corporate/business, luxury, and group travel markets - and lots more in between.

Its Leisure division is more than just a ‘bricks-and-mortar’ operation though. Its travel consultants - or ‘Flighties’ as they like to call themselves - are available in-store and over the phone, with additional support available 24/7. The expertise and experience these agents provide to their customers are what help set Flight Centre Canada head and shoulders above its competition.

The Flight Centre Travel Group’s mission is ‘to open up the world for those who want to see’. To deliver that goal it offers tailor-made holidays, group travel, vacation packages, tours, cruises, hotels, and flights – of course.

The challenge

Flight Centre Canada’s challenge was one most companies would relish.

It’s always had a strong commitment to service and has always been great at delivering it. The problem was Flight Centre didn’t have a way of proving it though. And, as an honest and ethical company, it couldn’t shout out from the rooftops to potential customers how great it was.

So, the company needed a centralised, automated process to gather and analyse customer feedback it could use to promote, maintain, and build on its service excellence.

That's why it called Feefo in.

How Feefo has helped

After a Flight Centre customer makes a booking with one of its agents Feefo sends them a feedback survey request asking for their views on the service they received. Part of this review invitation includes a Net Promoter Score® (NPS) question.

Recognised around the world, NPS is something a company can measure and then act on by asking customers what seems, at first sight, to be a deceptively simple question:

‘How likely are you to recommend the company to a friend or colleague?’

All the customer has to do is tick a scale from zero to ten - with zero ‘being not likely at all’ and ten being ‘extremely likely’. This allows us to place the customer into one of three categories:

• Promoters (9-10) - these are your most loyal customers. They’ll buy from you again and again and will tell people that they should use you too
• Passives (7-8) - these people have had a good experience when they’ve used you. But they’re not totally loyal and could be tempted away by your competitors
• Detractors (0-6) - you’ve let these customers down. And if you don’t do something about it, they’ll not use you again. Worse than that, they could harm your brand’s reputation by telling others how bad they thought you were

Analysing your NPS results can then help you: measure and increase your customer loyalty, make business decisions, and fix problems your customers may have had so they move up your NPS scale.

Here are just some of the ways Flight Center puts its NPS findings and reviews to work for itself - and its customers.

Sharing results from the boardroom to the sales floor

Now the company has a trusted and standardised way to measure customer satisfaction it’s been able to put a greater focus on delivering excellence throughout the business.

NPS results can be drilled down as far as regions, locations, and individual ‘Flighties’. So, they can now be used to identify opportunities for improvement, service trends, and customer pain points.

Feedback scores and analysis are shared with relevant parties across the company every month. The results are also available in real-time for location managers and other support staff. This lets them get straight in touch with customers leaving passive or negative reviews to see how they could have done better. This feedback is also relayed to Marketing, Operations, and the Senior Leadership Team to help guide management decision-making and the company’s strategy.

Fixing little problems…

Location Managers review their NPS responses and service comments at the start of the day. This means individual customer problems can be identified, addressed, and resolved as soon as possible. Doing simple things like this can help build relationships, retain customers, and create brand advocates.

...and bigger issues

Overall trends, from each sales channel, can be identified where similar sentiments are being found in customer comments. For example, at one point agent response times were being given a reason for lower scores. Simple changes to staffing levels and rostering were made to improve the response times.

Letting customers see how great it is

Flight Centre Canada’s NPS scores bear witness to what it already knew. It’s great at delivering the service its customers want and expect. In fact, its NPS scores are amongst the highest in the travel industry. So, the company now uses its NPS feedback to promote itself to customers – old, current, and new.

All the reviews it gets are accessible via its website. As an honest company, it’s not afraid to feature the great and not-so-great either to provide customers with total transparency on its service either.

It also proudly displays its Feefo Platinum Trusted Service Award badge on its website. Our highest accolade, it’s only presented to companies that have received a Gold Award three years in a row. And Flight Centre Canada will soon be incorporating more of its strong results into other areas of the business such as additional digital formats and its in-store collateral.

Flight Centre Canada and Feefo - a relationship beyond just NPS

NPS results analysis is just one of the ways Feefo helps Flight Centre in its drive to customer excellence. Other Feefo services the company uses include:

• Feedback request manager - where you can tailor feedback requests to different audiences and get feedback on each step of their customer journey.
• Insight labels - designed to give an at-a-glance look at what’s affecting your business and a better understanding of customer opinions.
• Customer sentiment insight- automatically analyses your review content to see where you’re succeeding, where you can improve, and what makes you special.
• Dynamic topic display - an AI-driven tool that tracks the customer reviews you get and collates them into the most mentioned themes and what your customers think is most important to them

Flight Centre Canada's review of Feefo