Craig McNally

Said the following about Liz Stephens - **HAS LEFT**:

“I'd like to nominate my colleague, Liz Stephens for this award. As a Travel Consultant at Newcastle Travel Centre, she has taken on the "Floor-walking" role over the last 18 months, overseeing all of the ticket machines on the station concourse and in the portico, where they have been located since the recent station redevelopment. Smartly disrupting time old processes and routines and stepping out of her comfort. She has helped revolutionise the way we work and brought valuable new ideas and enthusiasm to the job. She's often described as insatiably curious, working as part of a team she has helped introduce many new ways to assist customers and ways in which we can work smarter together. This includes remotely accessing travel centre applications via I pads to locate customers' bookings, utilising emails to exchange information in an instant, finding out real time train information on the spot, including passenger counts and crew information. She's a straight up member of the team and if she's told something can't be done she endeavours to find out why!

Her fellow team members describe Liz as "Red Hot" and has been integral in opening up channels of communication between the travel centre and other departments, including train guards and onboard crew. She's also arranged shadowing days for other staff members to understand how we can work better as a team with positive results and great feedback.

She constantly goes above and beyond her duties and strives for continuous improvement. Liz is an original member of the very first "Future Leaders" programme, where she had a key role in arranging a community project to teach school children about safety on the railway. She's also been heavily involved in facilitating the new "Virgin Way" workshops for employees, enforcing the company values and ways in which we can do things even better under our new brand. After spening three months on secendment as Duty Station Manager in Edinbrugh, she returned to Newcastle with even more ideas and confidence from skills she'd aquired during her time in the new role. One of her current projects includes revamping our current staff praise boards route wide to incoprorate the new "Virgin Values" in order to encourage and support staff when they do an amazing job.

Liz's customer service skills are second to none and she's constantly surprising, delighting customers and delivering a heartfelt service. Here is an extract from one of her most recent praise letters:

"I just wanted to take the time to pop you an email and let you know how awesome your staff member Liz was when my sister, my mother and I all met in Newcastle for a weekend break last weekend. I live in London, my twin sister lives in Leeds and my mum lives in York, so booking our weekend away together is never a simple process! We all ended up on slightly different trains home from Newcastle just due to booking them separately, but Liz very kindly arranged for my mum and I to travel on the same train to York (and on to London) together. She was super, super friendly and helpful, saw us struggling with all our tickets trying to work out what we could do, and came on over to us to see if she could sort us out.

I have done this journey ever other month for the past 8 years and actually stopped using the London“ York trains a couple of years ago as they are so expensive and Hull Trains were quite frankly a lot cheaper, a lot nicer, and offered free wifi on board. So I have used them for the last couple of years.... This experience last weekend has really changed my impression of the company, and I just wanted to let you know how impressed I was both by Liz and the company in general last weekend.

She is a genuine asset to your team..."

In short, Liz is an absolute pleasure to work with and a true inspiration. She's the embodiment of the company values and is a true role model to her colleagues. Her enthusiasm and constant flow of ideas are truly limitless and she'd be a worthy canditate for this award!“