Gatwick Express has won the award for Innovation in Customer Service for 2006 at the Railway Industry Innovation Awards ceremony, held in London.

The Railway Industry Innovation Awards represent the pinnacle of innovation amongst the UK rail industry and the judges are extremely strict with their criteria - demanding that the winners can demonstrate real results and truly original thinking in their submissions.

Andrew Conroy, Head of Customer Service for Gatwick Express says, “At Gatwick Express we passionately believe that the delivery of outstanding customer service, such as we have demonstrated consistently over the past three years, is directly related to employee communication, engagement and satisfaction.

Leading Lights is a highly original and creative programme which uses our guiding principles of being positively helpful, friendly and polite to provide an even better service for our customers.  The programme recognises the importance of understanding who our customers are, treating them as individuals and tailoring our service to their particular needs.

We have developed this training programme, which is delivered by our own staff, to proactively engage our workforce by using ‘real-life’ settings and professionally acted scenarios to spark interest and maintain attention in our trainees.  The new and ongoing training programme is about achieving targeted, long-term change in day-to-day behaviour and performance. It is not about imparting knowledge and skills that never make it back to the workplace.

A specific training room has been transformed at Gatwick Express’s Learning and Development Centre to reconstruct ‘real life’ settings where participants can act out scenarios. The programme employs actors to simulate authentic and challenging work situations and environments. Participants are then immersed in reality, not artificiality, whilst they learn.

This award is a welcome recognition from within the UK rail industry that Gatwick Express, despite already being the customers’ favourite rail company, is constantly striving to develop original programmes to improve its existing world-class record”.

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