Organization overview
Flight Centre Travel Group has been offering advice and making travel arrangements for customers since 1982, when they opened their first store in Sydney, Australia. Today, 36 years on, they are one of the world’s largest and most successful independent travel retailers. Achieving this status has required the company to stay continually abreast of changing demands, adapting their processes and technology to meet changing customer expectations.
As the company has grown, so too has the need for effective communication, knowledge sharing, and collaboration between dispersed employees. With over 19,000 global employees, operating across 2,800 retail outlets in over 90 different countries, Flight Centre required a technology solution that could unite employees, tools and resources on a single digital platform that would boost productivity and allow them to take their service provisions to new heights.
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Global employees: 19,000
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Retail outlets: 2,800
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Countries operated in: 90
The vision
Flight Centre prides itself on expert knowledge of travel destinations, travel routes, fairs, hotels and resorts in every corner of the globe. Combined with the ability to offer competitive prices, it is Flight Centre’s exceptional customer service upon which it has built a global reputation.
To continue to deliver on these principles in a competitive market, the company required a solution that would make it easier than ever to serve customers with rapid and accurate information.
The company’s legacy intranet, which had been in place for 15 years, suffered low engagement and adoption. It wasn’t trusted by employees and poor search functionality made it difficult for users to locate the information they needed at speed. Recognizing that the intranet could become a powerful tool for driving the companies’ digital transformation, the decision was taken to start from scratch with a new platform built on Unily’s DXC.
While the initial vision for the platform was one of a dynamic communications solution and information repository, leveraging the configuration opportunities afforded by Unily’s experience engine allowed Flight Centre to create a platform that could intimately support business processes and help agents deliver a superior service to customers. These configurations have transformed the intranet from a communications and information repository into an invaluable business tool.
Design focus
The design of PILOT was of paramount importance since the steering team believed that much of the platform’s credibility would rest upon how inviting and intuitive the platform was to use.
The legacy intranet had been uninspiring in terms of design and content delivery, leading employees to circumvent its use, instead relying on support teams to provide accurate information over the phone. As a result, there was a lag in productivity and poor use of resources, which the new intranet needed to combat.
“It was about creating credibility through quality look and feel, and also easy navgation by making sure content was where you’d expect it to be,” says Tessa Buckman, Head of Internal Communications at Flight Centre.
“We didn’t want a situation where we would have to train people on how to use the intranet; we wanted something where a user-guide was not necessary because it was so obvious where to go to find that information,” she explains.
Through design labs and Information Architecture planning sessions held with key stakeholders from across the business, the steering team was able to map out a mutually agreed design that ensured content was easy to access and presented in such a way the reflected the quality of the brand.
“We wanted our intranet to look as professional as our external websites do, and we wanted it to be very user-friendly,” says Tessa. Including frontline workers in the planning phase ensured that the intranet delivered an experience that matched the requirements and expectations of their predominant user-base. This user-centric approach had adoption and engagement motivations front and centre.
"We wanted our intranet to look as professional as our external websites do, and we wanted it to be very user-friendly."
Configured for productivity
A guiding mission for the new intranet was to accelerate productivity by giving employees faster access to tools and information.
Part of realizing this aim meant providing employees with one-click access to external business systems from within the intranet. Improving search so users could quickly find resources and information using keywords also delivered a significant productivity boost.
However, Flight Centre wished to take this one step further with more advanced configurations designed to support specific business functions, such as retrieving the most up to date airline fares or accessing a real-time feed of travel disruptions likely to affect customers.
Taking advantage of the flexibility offered by Unily’s experience engine, Flight Centre was able to tailor the platform to deliver faster, more intuitive ways of finding information and serving it up to users. In turn, this empowered agents to deliver a better service to customers.
One example of this was the creation of Air Hub, a searchable directory of airline information including fares, travel policies and service reviews.
“Air Hub tells our consultants which airlines give the best customer experience, so it was a really key area to get right,” asserts Tessa. “Since our launch, it’s still the most used area of our site, which just shows that people rely on this system to choose the best airline for their customer.” Elsewhere in the business, PILOT’s transformative effect on productivity was felt by the IT support team.
Prior to the intranet launch, IT had been required to send four update emails per hour to keep associates aware of issues with business-critical applications. The new intranet provided an opportunity to develop an IT site that could house all this information in a central location.
A Systems Status page allows users to quickly find out the status of any IT managed system, with an option to opt-in to receive real-time updates. Not only does this reduce the burden on IT but it also gives employees a more accurate view of the status of the technology they rely on.
"Air Hub tells our consultants which airlines give the best customer experience, so it was a really key area to get right."
Rebooting internal comms
The introduction of PILOT opened new internal communications opportunities for Tessa and her team of two. Where the previous intranet had suffered from poor engagement and limited comms functionality, the new platform provided a catalogue of mechanisms for connecting employees with corporate messaging and essential updates.
“I believe our people are the most important audience and deserve high quality communication that reaches the same levels of clarity and visual appeal as an external campaign from the marketing team would,” says Tessa, echoing the sentiment of Internal Comms professionals across the globe. In the travel industry, being able to react quickly to the latest deals, as well as disruptions that are likely to affect customer’s travel plans, is integral to delivering the kind of service that generates repeat custom.
Using the broadcast center, the Internal Communications team are now able to push out notifications, announcements, email newsletters, and mandatory content to users with ease. They are also able to take real ownership of the content published on PILOT, using the intuitive CMS to build out rich content in minutes.
“Previously we had to channel the vast majority of our communication via email. This meant a lot of inboxes were becoming extremely cluttered and it was very hard to get business-critical information to our teams,” explains Tessa.
Since the launch, Flight Centre have noted an 88% reduction in emails, demonstrating a rapid and instinctive change in the way employees communicate.
“Our leaders are big fans of the intranet,” says Tessa. “It makes it far easier for them to roll-out and clarify new product strategies. For example, if we are promoting a new product range that we believe gives our customers an amazing experience, we can publish this online so all the important details can quickly be found.” “Emails can be lost or deleted, but the intranet remains an easy-to-reference information hub, where consultants can learn more about our product ranges or quickly clarify something they didn’t understand during a meeting or on an email chain.”
Enhancing employee experience
Implementing a centralized digital workplace that acquired true engagement from employees provided an opportunity to foster a richer
sense of company culture. “With a new digital workplace, we were able to promote elements of our culture and company benefits like never before,” explains Tessa. “One of our core philosophies is our people. We have therefore made the intranet into a vibrant hub for anyone looking for career opportunities, leadership training, and benefits.”
This focus on improving the employee experience is clear from the homepage, where a drop-down menu of workspaces provides easy access to everything from training and development opportunities to company benefits.
One of the most popular areas of the site is Travelwise, which provides employees with an exhaustive and searchable directory of discounted travel deals for their own holidays. “Before we had the intranet, these offers were very much hidden to our staff,” recalls Tessa. “They had to contact a small support team of four people to discover if they had any offers in Asia for example.” Through Travelwise, PILOT has been able to make employee benefits more accessible, boosting employee satisfaction, while also relieving the workload on a support team with limited resources.
"I believe our people are the most important audience and deserve a high quality communication that reaches the same levels of clarity and visual appeal as an external campaign from the marketing team would."
