Eurostar's Neil Roberts on customer service and customer experience

At last week’s Shift event in London Neil Roberts, Head of Digital at Eurostar, talked about the company’s approach to customer experience. 

Neil says Eurostar is a highly customer oriented company. Its entire operations system revolves around bringing a customer from a point A to a point B whilst crossing the channel and the border between France and Great Britain.

So how does a company manage to keep its customers satisfied and provide them with an unbeatable customer experience?

Choose the digital platform wisely

As Neil explains, the customer must drive the company’s strategy from beginning to end. The customer is the “only profit centre”. Although there has to be a combination of a product led and a customer led strategy; the first questions should be asked to the customer as they are the ones who will invest their loyalty and money into your company.

The first call of action is through social media, which is a great platform to engage with customers.

However, the dilemma is which platform to choose. Neil explains that the technology needs to remain one that customers use. Eurostar uses Facebook and Twitter because those are the channels its customers use to communicate.

Two social media platforms, Weibo and WeChat, are dedicated to Eurostar’s Chinese customers, for whom Facebook and Twitter are less commonly used. This makes sense as many Eurostar customers live in China and use the train services when travelling in Europe.

Listen to the customer

The rate of response for Eurostar is very fast, maximum 24 hours. Not only do they respond fast, they also offer a customised response to each consumer query.

  

 

Neil explains that the key to listening to customers is to experience the Eurostar journey from their point of view.

The Eurostar team ask for customers to send them diaries and video blogs of their journeys. Visual communications are encouraged to maximise understanding of the customer needs.

For example, Eurostar customer Alex complained on Twitter about the lack of electric plugs for his child’s laptop.

Alex C.-M. @Eurostar Your new trains are very design… but not very practical! #WhereAreThePlugs

Eurostar @Calenestel They are under your seats… your child can watch his movie in his own seat next time.

The visual communication enabled Eurostar to fully understand the problem the customer was facing. They were then able to provide a customised response.

Go digital but don’t forget the physical

Neil explained that although the recent trend is to go completely digital in terms of customer service, sometimes you must acknowledge both the digital and physical customer experiences.

As he points out, the front line staff knows the customer better than anyone in head office. A key part of collecting customer feedback is to talk to the front row employees because “they don’t want their customers to be unhappy”. The feedback you can get from these people is invaluable to make your product better.

(Source: https://www.facebook.com/eurostar/photos)

Neil believes that digital change hasn’t only introduced new ways of communicating with customers. It has introduced the very notion of talking to the customer in the first place, and this should include offline as well as online communication.

 

Whether online or offline, Eurostar aims to provide outstanding levels of customer service. Neil proudly explains that his job title might be Head of Digital, but his real responsibility is to be to the glue that holds the digital and physical businesses together.