TUI: Improving Customer Experience to Boost Revenue
As the world’s leading tourism group, TUI takes pride in delivering excellent customer experience throughout the entire customer journey. Well before Covid-19 propelled e-commerce from a ‘nice to have’ to an essential operational element for many businesses, the travel giant well understood the importance of a flawless digital experience as a driver for revenue growth, brand loyalty, and higher lifetime customer value.
One method used by TUI to understand and measure customer experience (CX) is Net Promoter Score (NPS), which relies on survey results to understand customer satisfaction and brand loyalty levels. While NPS is highly valued, TUI’s team of expert data analysts wanted to further quantify the online customer journey to uncover deeper insights into engagement, conversion and navigation. Why do some customers complete their booking, while others do not? Was there a way to measure the success or failure of this journey?
The Power of Collaboration
To answer these questions, TUI turned to two trusted partners – Station10 and Decibel.
We were already working with TUI as an extension of their Advanced Analytics team, so had a strong understanding of their customers, KPIs, and performance data.
Decibel had recently released the world’s first technology designed specifically to quantify online customer experiences, their Digital Experience Score (DXS®), powered by data science and machine learning.
Together, we harnessed our combined expertise and knowledge to identify and prioritise areas for customer experience improvement.
How we helped
The goal of the project was to understand if Decibel’s DXS directly correlated with booking conversions on TUI’s website. As data analytics specialists, Station10 would conduct the validation study.
TUI provided data about customer journeys through the holiday booking funnel, highlighting attributes such as: number of successful searches, errors, and progression to checkout. Station10 blended this data with Decibel’s DXS data, tracking every session from the TUI website over two months. After we cleaned the data – a vital part of the process – the total number of sessions in common and available for analysis was 11 million.
Key Results & Business Value
The study proved a close link between TUI’s Digital Experience Score and online conversions. For example, a DXS greater of 8.5 or more results in a 90%+ probability of converting, while sessions with a DXS of less than 6 were unlikely to result in a holiday booking.
Most importantly, the greatest opportunity for TUI lies with sessions with a DXS between 6 and 7.5. In these cases, a one-point DXS increase contributes to a 43.6% increase in the probability of converting.
TUI took the results of the validation study and developed them further, analysing the results against booking revenue. They discovered that improving DXS for sessions falling between a 5 and a 6 to a level of 6.5 to 7.5 will improve the probability of conversion by up to 50%. Within this window, a one-point improvement translates to in excess of £20 million ($30 million) in TUI’s annualised revenue.
From a tactical perspective, the project provided the travel leader with:
- Clear direction on how to make their digital experience better, and
- The ability to quickly identify issues that need attention, then prioritise actions to ensure a consistent positive customer experience.
For example, DXS insights revealed a point of frustration causing abandonment in TUI’s check-out flow. TUI took that intelligence and implemented changes which improved the flow and shortened the forms.
Due to Station10’s independent validation, TUI can now quantify digital customer experience and confidently correlate the impact of positive experience on conversion and revenue, making DXS a critical tool for TUI’s Analytics and Digital teams.
The strategic value of DXS has also been extended to TUI executives to assess, plan, forecast and budget for future digital investment.
“Putting customers at the heart of our decision making is essential; if we improve the experience for customers, we will drive greater commercial performance. The challenge is to find a measure that truly reflects the experience customers are having so we can improve pain points and create seamless journeys. Decibel’s DXS provides this measure”.
“We can focus on customer issues highlighted by low scores and feed those hypotheses to product teams for development and testing. DXS provides a scientific and measurable way of continuously improving our CX levels”.