Case study - Repairing refunds

Both customers and employees were constantly complaining about Flight Centres clunky refund process.

Part of the refund process was for Flight Centre to wait for Airlines to process the refund back to Flight Centre before the refund could be processed back to the customer.

This would take approximately 12-18 weeks and was assumed to be the cause of all refund complaints.

48% of all service related complaints were refunds. 40% of refund delay complaints relate to delay in agent processing rather than supplier delays.

This insight highlighted that a process and system improvement within Flight Centre could significantly improve both customer and employee experience.

Many Flight Centre leaders were under the impression that despite the high volume of refund complaints, the root cause was not worth solving as the problem was on the supplier end.

The insights our team generated from our discovery proved that there was much within the remit of Flight Centre to work with and improve the refund experience for both customers and employees.

Before jumping right into discovery, we like to gather resources and documents from teams across the business so we can leverage the work that has already been done, avoiding duplication and unnecessary re-work.

We received many PPTs, PDFs, and Excel documents from various teams across the business around both customer and employee complaints.

We then used our Python programming capability to run queries across all documents drawing findings and insights about attitudes, behaviours and verbatim about refunds from both customers and employees.

This helped us draw the initial key insight that most refunds were a result of an agent processing delay instead of supplier delays. This insight helped us form the narrative to present to the executive team that the initial perception of refunds being outside Flight Centre’s control was not being backed by data.

Our service blueprint and insights deck highlighted the friction points across the entire refunds experience (retail & online) for both customers and employees.

We also provided recommendations to better digitise and streamline the refunds process so ensure agent processing delays were reduced to <2% and provide greater transparency for both customers and employees.