case studies — TUI UK

TUI UK Ltd. is part of the World of TUI, the world's largest tourism and services group, which owns many of Europe's best-known holiday brands and has leadership positions in the airline, inclusive tour business and travel agency sectors.

background

TUI UK Ltd. ("TUI") has always believed collecting feedback across its customer touch points is critical to its business. For example, TUI has a strong history of collecting data via customer service questionnaires. However, it collected very limited feedback from its online users. The online feedback it did receive typically was from surveys, which meant it provided only a snapshot of customer comments and needs. In order to support the increasing importance of its online business as a critical customer touch point, TUI decided to explore how best to continuously monitor the opinions, and consequently the experience, of its online users. In early 2003, TUI began to investigate how best to listen continually to its online visitors.

TUI established four key criteria to evaluate online feedback/user experience management solutions:

After searching for solutions worldwide, TUI chose the OnlineOpinion® system from OpinionLab. "OpinionLab scored high in all 4 areas," remarked TUI's Head of New Media. "My colleagues and I were very impressed with their OnlineOpinion solution. Plus, OpinionLab's employees went out of their way to demonstrate their expertise and win our business."

implementation

TUI implemented OpinionLab's OnlineOpinion system across four domains - www.thomson.co.uk, www.lunnpoly.com, www.portland-holidays.co.uk and www.thomsonfly.com - with each domain customizing "O", OnlineOpinion's patented data collection technique, to match its business objectives.

For example, on the www.portland-holidays.co.uk website, TUI used the standard version of "O", a "floating" [+] icon (see it circled in red in Exhibit 1). The [+] icon employs JavaScript to remain in the bottom right corner of the Web page, even if the user scrolls up or down the Web page. By floating in the corner, the [+] icon remains highly visible, thereby maximizing the amount of feedback collected from website visitors.

On www.thomson.co.uk, TUI chose to implement "O" as a static link in its footer (see the link circled in red in Exhibit 2), because it wanted the link to match the look and feel of the website as well as to minimize its weight on the Web page.

Regardless of the customization on each of the four domains, TUI installed "O" across as many Web pages as possible. As discussed in the "Results" section below, this enabled TUI to identify user challenges that they might not have otherwise been aware of and to compare the user experience across pages and directories within a website.

results

TUI uses the OnlineOpinion system in two ways. First, the system helps TUI identify areas of the website that visitors rate poorly from a user experience standpoint. TUI understands that failure to address these concerns in a timely manner can hamper its online sales. OnlineOpinion's 24/7 Metric report, and its accompanying Scan Graph, make it easy for TUI to identify and quantify underperforming Web pages in real-time (see Exhibit 3). In the Scan Graph, green lines represent pages on TUI's websites that are on average rated positively by visitors, black lines represent pages that are on average rated neutrally and red lines represent pages that are on average rated negatively. The length of each line indicates how many ratings that page has received.

The 24/7 Metric's Scan Graph immediately identified a number of TUI Web pages with significant opportunities for improvement - i.e. long black or red lines. Using the visual diagnostics of the Scan Graph, TUI was able to identify these Web pages, as well as review comments and contextual and behavioral data essential to understanding the user issues.

"One opportunity we saw right away was that customers were frustrated because they could not search TUI's entire travel inventory at one time," commented TUI's Head of New Media. "The 24/7 Metric report helped us identify and diagnose the issue so we could make the appropriate change. We then used the system to test the user reaction to the change - all in real-time."

TUI's websites now enable users to search easily across its entire travel inventory, and as a result, sales have improved dramatically.

Second, OnlineOpinion enables TUI to track month-to-month improvement in user experience across its four brands. Each month, OnlineOpinion delivers to TUI brand-specific Site Opinion Indices (SOIs). The SOIs provide an overall measure of website user experience on a scale from 0 to 1,000. Exhibit 4 illustrates how one of TUI's SOIs has tracked since July 2003. (The numerical values on the y-axis purposely have been removed in order to maintain confidentiality requirements. Nevertheless, Exhibit 4 highlights that TUI's SOI reflects a positive trend in overall user experience.)

"We are very pleased that our SOIs are increasing, some by as much as 16%," said TUI's Head of New Media. "The SOIs provide evidence that the changes we are making to our websites are being positively received by our website visitors."

Additionally, TUI benchmarks its SOIs against OpinionLab's Reference Opinion Index, which aggregates SOIs from other OnlineOpinion subscribers. Each of TUI's brands is also placed into an OpinionLab defined category - from "Excellent" to "Serious Challenges" - to further help determine its relative performance (see Exhibit 5).

going forward

TUI has discovered that listening to online users is a continuous process. "Although we are very pleased that our websites continue to improve from the user's perspective, we realize we still have some way to go," remarked TUI's Head of New Media. "As we improve our online capabilities, the customer expectations also increase."

OnlineOpinion has helped TUI successfully integrate its customers' "voice" into its user experience management process. Development priorities and improvement initiatives are now solidly based on information from visitors about their needs and experiences. OnlineOpinion has become a principle element of TUI's online continuous improvement process.

typical monthly activity

	Timeframe	January 1 - 31, 2004
	Total ratings collected during timeframe	11,768 ratings
	Number of pages rated	54 pages
	Number of content, design, and usability ratings	651 C, D and U ratings (5.5% of ratings)
	Number of ratings with comments	334 comments (2.8% of ratings)
	Analysis tools used	24/7 Metric Toolkit, O-Trend and Page Viewer