TUI – Service That’s So Good, People Talk About It.

TUI_Word_of_Mouth_Marketing

The Challenge Was…?

After a tough couple of years, the task was to put TUI-owned Mediterranean villa specialist Simply Travel back on the road to growth. At the heart of that strategy was an improvement in the holiday experience – customer service scores had been sliding for the previous 5 years and if the experience didn’t improve, any marketing-led growth strategy was bound to founder.

We had the raw materials to work with – Simply Travel had a brand new shiny vision and values which had just been expressed – but how could we use them to deliver the turnaround in service that was required?

…and the Solution?

Rather than prescribe how the new vision and values should be translated into service – a strategy that’s always doomed to failure given that the people doing the prescribing are not on the front line – we put together training sessions which explained the values and then asked the staff how to translate them into service.  Our faith was rewarded – the ideas their came up with were so much better than we  could have generated. All they needed was a little prompting to get them going.

But generating ideas was only part of the problem. The next challenge was ensuring they were put into action. New management processes and procedures were put into place to ensure the front line staff had the resources, the space and the management back up to make their ideas become a reality.

Customer service ratings leapt by 10% in one year – recovering all the short fall of the previous 4 years. Customers were raving about the service again – valuable word of mouth that would help Simply to grow.