Air France Takes Employee Engagement To New Heights In Their Contact Center

Air France KLM is one of the world’s leading airlines, employing over 80,000 staff to meet the travel needs of 140,000 passengers every day.

In 2018, it offered its customers access to a network covering 314 destinations in 116 countries thanks to its four brands Air France, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Transavia and HOP! Air France. With a fleet of 545 aircraft in operation and 98.7 million passengers carried in 2017, Air France-KLM operates up to 2,300 daily flights, mainly from its hubs at Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Amsterdam-Schiphol.

Air France and KLM clocked up 85 years and 99 years of air travel excellence respectively in 2018, with no signs of stopping.

The company’s London-based European Sales & Service Centre (ESSC) plays a crucial role in the success of Air France KLM. With 300 staff spread across two locations, this busy team handles thousands of enquiries each day from travelers around the world.

Staff are constantly attending to customer calls, tweets or posts via social media, handling claims or making bookings, and flicking between different applications to find the information they need.

Georgina Gray has been Communications Officer at the ESSC for nearly 18 months. The responsibility of keeping all staff in this bustling contact center informed and engaged lies with her.

Effective communication with so many staff can be challenging at the best of times. Important operational information needed to be conveyed to staff, while staff morale and satisfaction needed to be maintained.

Georgina knew that the ESSC could not rely on email alone and that a more modern approach was required – one that ensured essential information was actually read and that employees engaged with it.

Better internal communications were essential to ensure ESSC’s employee engagement didn’t hit turbulence.

Fast communication of operational updates and reminders were achieved through tickers. Broader promotional or social messages were communicated using wallpaper and lock screens.

Georgina summarized this by saying, “We have tried to make it not just about corporate information. We’re really focused on our people, on building a community and getting people more engaged.”

The combination of channels was used to encourage staff to visit the intranet to read the latest updates (such as departmental results or health and wellbeing events), plus build interest and excitement around events (including that highlight of the office social calendar – the Christmas party!).

In addition, it was decided to make the tools more inclusive – extending the use out to more staff than before. Georgina explains: “Previous use was very much the management sending out business-related messages. Now we have extended this to supervisors as well, so it’s not just top-down – we also have cross-departmental messages.”

In the first year of using SnapComms tools, Georgina has been pleased with how they’ve helped her achieve her internal communication goals.

Despite the unique challenges of a large, busy contact center, she has seen a real improvement in employee engagement. Staff are more invested in things that are happening in the company and are making greater use of the intranet. “SnapComms really complements our internal intranet”, believes Georgina.

Because many of their communications are visual, wallpapers and lock screens are especially effective. Georgina enthuses that lock screen is her favorite tool. She believes that it captures staff attention because they are required to view it before they log back in. “They can’t ‘X’ it away. If we’re promoting an event, the wallpaper and lock screen are much more effective”.

For the communications team at the ESSC, introducing SnapComms has been instrumental in driving employee engagement – in turn supporting their wider business goals.