Transport for London
Making Every Journey Matter
Putting customer service at the heart of the business, throughout the business, motivating teams to apply their own flavour in order to create an authentic service culture.
The challenge
Customer expectations of Transport for London were growing. Safety and reliability still came first, but with digital and social media people expected more — and had more ways to say so. Inside the organisation, employees had been clear that a shared idea of what excellent customer service looked like was missing. Earlier attempts to define it had been written in management language and had not been embedded in the way people worked, so staff and managers could not consistently say what world-class customer service was.
Our approach
We reviewed TfL’s strategies, programmes and customer and staff research, then worked with employees from every part of the organisation to develop a customer value proposition — Making Every Journey Matter — redrafting, testing and validating it until it was in employees’ own words and something they would sign up to. We mapped the customer journey for every role, not just the customer-facing ones, so each person could see exactly where they touched the customer.
Then we embedded it in the employee experience: recruitment, induction, training and development, management, performance, reward and recognition, and communications. In all, the programme changed the way 12,000 people at TfL operated, with the customer at the heart of the business.
What we produced
The customer value proposition and its four commitments; customer journeys for every role; the employee-experience framework; an animated film, leadership briefings, a manager toolkit, train-the-trainer programmes, recruitment and induction materials, environmental graphics across the network, and a live customer-sentiment map that measures the change using contact-centre and social-media data alongside TfL’s mystery-shopper and staff surveys.
What the work provides
A definition of great customer service that came from TfL’s own people rather than being handed down — embedded in how they are recruited, trained, managed and rewarded, and placing customer service alongside safety and reliability in everyday working life.