Case Studies

Red Funnel is the pivotal link between Southampton on the UK mainland and the popular holiday destination of the Isle of Wight. But with strong competition on their doorstep Red Funnel recognised that increasing their market share would require a competitive differentiator that went beyond price or convenience.

So in 2014 Red Funnel defined its vision of becoming the customers’ choice and preferred partner to the Isle of Wight, and set about turning its aspiration into reality by creating an end-to-end customer experience that was a meaningful and memorable part of their customers’ holidays. To achieve their goal, the leadership team focussed on their fleet, their on-board services and their external branding and promotion, knowing the key to success was to deliver the new customer promise through their people. The challenge was to create the conditions for a customer first culture to thrive.

Customer expectations in the travel sector had never been higher. Price and destination are not the only factors driving choice and LLA’s senior leadership team understood that the passenger experience starts from the moment you enter the terminal and that this experience has a huge knock on impact on consumer decisions pre-boarding.

The team identified security as one of the key touchpoints in the customer journey where
loyalty can be won or lost. Employees in these areas were understandably prioritising compliance and regulations over delivering a meaningful human to human experience. So, the UK’s 5th largest airport embarked upon a programme to make all passengers feel valued at all times by turning its employeesinto ‘Great Journey Makers’.

Following the UK CSI report in July 2016, BMW found they had significant room for improvement in their customer effort scores. The organisation subsequently focused its customer strategy on being easy to do business with, under the banner of “Simply Successful.”

We had a ‘kerching’ moment when we understood that engaged people give you a ‘Discretionary Effort’ that customers notice. We are now in the top 10% of UK companies for Employee Engagement following the Simply Brilliant programme. We recognise that engaged people are more productive. This has been a perfect period for us – improved engagement, improved customer satisfaction and costs falling

Our operating costs reduced by 35% which self-funded our entire programme. Since the programme, we have achieved our highest ever employee engagement scores since our P&L was formed and our NPS score achieved a new record of +32 in July: 20 points up from where we started