Flight Centre is a large and complex business with many teams involved in every step of the customer journey. To provide exceptional experiences, FC needed to understand how it currently delivers products and services. This understanding helped identify and address any issues that customers or employees face throughout their buying journey.
To tackle this challenge and guide executives in prioritising the most impactful improvements for both the customer and employee experience. I decided to use a service blueprint. One of Flight Centre's objectives was to evaluate the effectiveness of their OMNI program (retail + online channel integration strategy), and its impact on customers and employees. The OMNI program refers to the seamless management of FC's online and retail channels working seamlessly together inline with customer expectations and current behavioural trends.
FC sought to gain practical insights by examining the implementation of OMNI and understanding whether or not it enhances both customer and employee experience.
Given the scale and impact of the OMNI within FC, we had to speak with many staff members across a range of roles and functions to better understand how the current phase of OMNI has impacted their day to day, and understand their perspective on future impacts. There were a total of 43 conducted interviews, across 16 different teams. Out of these, 20 interviews were conducted across retail consultants (those most impacted by OMNI). The remainder interviews were with various SMEs across other parts of the journey to understand their role and friction points.
After conducting our discovery, there was a whole range of learnings across many data points. I used a combination of Miro and Dovetail to cluster themes and looked across multiple data points to turn these learnings into insights. The insights uncovered by the discovery work are listed below:
1. Customers
2. Notifications
3. Systems and process
4. Rollout Strategy
5. Training
As OMNI evolves, customers are increasingly taking on a more self-serve role. To ensure a smooth experience, there’s a need to simplify and clarify things for customers, including access to information, usability, and user experience (UX). By making things easier for customers, it will also become easier for consultants to understand and assist them.
According to 80% of consultants, they frequently receive calls from customers due to confusion and lack of clarity in our content and processes. This means that customers often reach out for assistance because they find information and procedures to be confusing and unclear on the platform
“Some processes can be improved to become more customer friendly because some processes cause unnecessary steps and create confusion. For example, if you have an invoice that's confirmed, and you add to that with quoted products, those are separated into 2 documents - one quote, one invoice and both do not share the same information." - Josh
Consultants play a crucial role in handling customer requests. However, it's important to have a contingency plan in place for situations when consultants are unavailable, such as when they are on leave. Delays in addressing customer needs can lead to missed opportunities for us and can also have a negative impact on the customer experience.
According to 75% of consultants, having a well-defined contingency plan for consultant leaves is crucial during the early phases of OMNI implementation. Since OMNI heavily relies on the initial actions taken by consultants, it is essential to ensure a consistent approach even when a consultant is absent.
“Customers call up frustrated when the person they have been interacting with are on leave and they need something done because when things are online customers expect things instantly." - Tim
The output of my engagement resulted in the key executive leadership team gaining a deeper understanding of the key pain points throughout their current product and service model. The service blueprints also highlighted key features in pipeline over the coming 6-12 months and the respective pain points they were going to resolve. The executive leadership team could see the gaps in their product and service model that needed immediate attention which were not even considered prior to the service blueprint work.
The key focus area was Flight Ticketing and refunds as many of the key problems resulted in substantial productivity costs and poor experiences for both customers and employees. There has been many initiatives implemented since the service blueprint engagement to further explore how they could improve the Flight Ticketing and refund experience.
