Jay Thompson

Said the following about Abellio Greater Anglia Inspire employee customer service programme:

“Training Team of the Year – for the Inspire employee customer service programme

The Abellio Greater Anglia (AGA) “Inspire” team introduced and delivered a customer service programme known as Inspire to develop and encourage our colleagues to put the customer at the heart of everything that we do as a company do. The aim was to make it clear that no matter what their job role, everyone plays an important part in our customer’s journey, as well as inspiring them to deliver a better service to our customers, day in, day out, thereby increasing both customer and employee satisfaction.

We had put forward an initial committed franchise obligation to deliver training to 2,074 colleagues focusing on the vision, values and customer-centred ethos of the company, through 163 two-day events, by January 2014. With the dedication and focus of the training team this was achieved by November 2013. Then, throughout 2014, we continued delivering the programme to the rest of the company, so that 2975 colleagues have attended Inspire events.

The success of the programme meant that in 2015 we were then developed and implemented a second phase of the programme, as part of our second short franchise, with the introduction of “Inspire…Continuing the Journey”, which is a continuation and evolution of the original two day event and has been developed from colleague feedback. These events focus on pride, responsibility, accountability and how colleagues can make a difference to the customer’s experience.

To date 603 delegates from the across the business have attended this event. The team endeavour to lead by example and embody the business values in the way they conduct their roles and work together in a supportive, progressive environment, and also help by volunteering for special events and during disruption.

Challenges the team have faced include encouraging all colleague to live the values and behaviours consistently while also facing the everyday challenges of ensuring full attendance on each event, hitting our required targets and encouraging management buy in. All of the team keep in regular contact with Managers and Head of Department to update on the progress of Inspire, encouraging support and cooperation for all the Inspire events.

The Inspire team include Jackie Gibbs (Head of Service Quality Standards) who leads the team, guides the programme and ensures its continued success; Lucy Tomlinson (Customer Service Development Programme Manager) who has overseen the day to day running of the events and has been working on Inspire since its inception in 2012; Charlotte Pearson (Customer Service Development Programme Trainer) who was recruited within the business when she originally facilitated the earlier events as a champion from revenue protection; and finally Stacy Gillespie (Customer Service Programme Coordinator) who is a new addition to the team (having joined in February 2015), who organises the attendance and data recording for the programme.

They are a very strong dedicated team who rely on effective, positive communication with each other to ensure targets are met, while at the same time encouraging others to deliver the “Abellio Way”. They have shown innovation and creativity in the events by updating and refreshing the session plans as necessary, acting on feedback and their own experiences.

Our in-house magazine regularly features the delegates on our events, with updates and insight from our team of champions who help facilitate the events. Our company intranet is also updated on a regular basis for colleagues to view the progress of the initiative, access documents associated with the scheme and monitor the success of the programme. The team regularly visit colleagues at stations, depots and offices around our network to talk about the Inspire programme and listen to feedback from a complete range of colleagues.

Results of the Inspire Programme can be seen in:

• An increase in NRPS scores for Attitude and helpfulness of Staff at stations.

• An increase in Mystery shop scores for different departments.

• Increased praise and feedback for the company with several staff mentioned positively on social media within days of having attended an event.

• Positive and encouraging event feedback from our colleagues.

Examples of comments from colleagues include:

“made me rethink how I work and feel pride in my role”,

“uplifting and improving overall morale”,

“Very relevant and helps to take more ownership and responsibility”

“help us to understand that we as individuals can make a great impact on colleagues, customers and the organisation as a whole”

These endorsements are reiterated in the feedback forms about the events where 97% of colleagues have marked the training team for the second Inspire two day programme as good or very good in their feedback scores. In addition, 86% of colleagues have marked the training team for that programme as good or very good in their feedback scores.

Some other positive achievements which are either wholly or partially due to the impact of the Inspire training programme include:

• An average 10% increase in individual “100%” employee service quality scores.

• Overall People Service Quality Standards improved by 8%.

• The Colleague Opinion Survey has seen the best results since 2004.

• Colleagues’ confidence, engagement and accountability has grown.

• Increased items of praise have been sent via Social Media and to Customer Relations.

• Positive feedback from our customer panel and other rail industry organisations.

• Ticketless travel results improved by 6% to 3.2%.

• The Inspire programme has been accredited by the Institute of Customer Service.

• “Bringing the Abellio Values to Life” Award at the 2015 Abellio Achievement Awards.

• AGA won the 2013 British Quality Foundation Achievement in Customer Satisfaction Award.

• The Silver IiP Award was secured for the Revenue Protection & Customer Relations teams.

• The Gold IiP Award was secured for the Operations, Train Presentation and Finance Teams.

In summary, the “Inspire” training team have delivered an excellent customer-focused employee training programme against tight timescales, which has developed and inspired employees, increased pride, raised service delivery standards and increased customer and employee satisfaction.“