Travelport: Surviving industry disruption through employee loyalty
Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 8:21AM Travelport is a company providing the information infrastructure for travel agencies. Consisting of the combination of Galileo and WorlSpan under a private equity firm's ownership, the company needed to turn around its customer relationships quickly in order to preserve and grow revenue. The travel industry has been undergoing massively disruptive structural change, with airlines selling direct to customers and overall margins in the business under long term threat.
They quickly concluded they needed to understand employee engagement, and knew that the usual top down approach to developing an action plan would not have fast enough impact in the context of the merged company's culture. So they explored NPS as a way to gather high quality verbatim feedback associated with a hard metric.
Their initial experiment, among 1,600 employees in 8 offices yielded an abysmal score, a hierarchy of issues to be addressed and really caught the attention of the company's senior leadership. The CEO (after he calmed down) loved the fact that he now had the opportunity to take action on issues the employees had identified and prioritized. This led to a full company roll out a few months later.
The initial roll out was great in terms of generating focus and attention. But, like many executive teams, Travelport leadership encountered lots of challenges. For example, when the first round of feedback came in, some leaders focused far too much on the scores. As a result, the first instinct in several cases was to fire an office leader where the scores were especially low. A more productive approach would have been digging into the verbatim and following up with local employees to understand what was really going on. In more than one case, what Wasserstein needed were policy or other changes rather than a new local leader.
After the second round of feedback, the company was able to focus more on how to improve employee engagement. Three of the top five issues related to communications. Involving employees in solving the issues, both for employees and customers, created tremendous goodwill and momentum. An Employee Advisory Group was set up, soliciting feedback through an online community that has grown to include almost 40% of employees. These employees were able to both generate great suggestions for improvement and to accelerate communication to others in the organization.
Now Travelport gets 90% response rates to their employee NPS surveys. They can look at their feedback by function and have customized versions of the survey for each group. Over the course of their work on this, they have achieved a 31 point increase in employee NPS. They have generated millions of dollars in cost savings.
Travelport is now experimenting with transactional employee NPS. For example, they now measure new employee NPS around the induction process. They are also beginning to correlate customer and employee NPS. So far, they have found high correlations not only in the scores, but also in the contents of the comments. Unsurprisingly, employees identify many of the same issues about which customers complain.
Bottom line: a robust closed feedback employee NPS program can turbocharge customer loyalty and improve the financial performance of your business.
Reader Comments (1)
Implementing an effective Employee Incentive Programs includes a variety of tactics meant to foster a high performance culture where employees produce results. By closely linking the winning criteria of such a program with business objectives and goals an organization can accomplish some hefty goals such as generating buy-in of business strategy or encourage innovation.