TUI service culture – Going the extra smile

Objective – To define and deliver a unified service culture: linking colleagues across the business to deliver an improved and differentiated service that will drive customer loyalty.

My role – To lead the work stream to define TUI UK&I’s service culture in 2014; how this fits with the employer brand, values and behaviours; benchmarking with other service organisations; validate with front line staff and develop a framework to communicate this.

Solution – Desk research highlighted a frustration with barriers to delivering optimal service, operational silos, but a strong desire to be empowered to do what is right for the customer. The principle I worked on throughout this project was that a service culture cannot be applied it needs to come from within – ‘to the people, from the people’, so using this research we identified the key pillars for success:

  • Understand your customers
  • Know your stuff
  • One team approach
  • Solve on the spot

These pillars resonated with front line staff (because they had identified them) and through further cross functional focus groups these pillars were titled and an overall unified service culture was developed reflecting the language, passion and fun that is distinctly TUI by picking up on the smile logo… “Going the extra smile”.

Outcome – The unified service culture was initially created to be UK source market specific, but seeing the global benefits of this programme it was quickly picked up by other source markets.