Developing the St Pancras service brand
Recruiting and training customer service operatives for the opening of St Pancras Station
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Business Challenge
When St Pancras was identified as the new home for the Eurostar service it set out to be much more than a ‘railway station’. In addition to being the key destination for the Eurostar, and high-speed rail travel in the UK, St Pancras set itself the goal of becoming a truly grand retail and hospitality destination.
Underpinning this vision lay the need to set the benchmark for customer service excellence by providing more and better trained staff.
More than 70 existing employees were transferring from to the ST Pancras project and a further 100 new employees needed to be recruited for the opening of St Pancras and Ebbsfleet stations. The challenges were to identify the right recruits and to develop and train-in superior service standards which reflected both the travel and retail experiences customers would enjoy.
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Echelon’s Solution
Echelon took on the challenge of recruiting the new staff, advertising for a week in the London freesheets produced over 1500 applications. . Competency based assessment centres were run at the Emirates Stadium to select the 100+ new recruits. A total of 200 customer service operatives were then trained to deliver best-practice customer service using these competencies, we were searching for people with exceptional customer service capability. We used highly-engaging learning methods, incorporating the support of a buddy support system into the induction programme.
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Key Benefits
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Over 40 million customers a year enjoy the results.
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Blending existing security skills with retail experience introduced new customer service behaviours.
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The recruitment and training process embedded the new airline style of service standards and reinforced St Pancras as a destination experience rather than a station.
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Echelon, Angles House, 210 Sheen Lane, London SW14 8LB; 020 8274 9965