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.
Marc Mulrooney
Customer Experience Manager
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Marc Mulrooney
Customer Experience Manager