Case Study – Travel Intermediary (Ferry Bookings)
Problems
An International Travel Booking Intermediary takes ferry bookings through its website. These bookings are added to its Virtual Inventory (VI). Every time a booking is made by a customer, an equivalent booking needs to be made with the travel operator. Where inventory is no longer available, alternative options need to be relayed to the customer and on confirmation from the customer, the booking needs to be made with the travel operator. Once the booking is made, the booking needs to be confirmed to the customer.
With a huge peak of demand over the summer months, the business needed to recruit, train and manage approximately 5x the staff for the Contact Centre / admin team compared with the off season.
Manual process leads to huge costs. Queues at busy times lead to poor perception from customers as bookings not confirmed in a timely manner.
Solution – Phase 1:
IntelliAgent trained to process virtual inventory bookings across multiple operators. It communicates back and forth with the customer to confirm changes when needed and sends confirmation to customers when booking is completed.
As a result, the requirement to temporarily recruit large numbers of staff for the summer period was massively reduced. The core team of advisers were able to focus on handling the more interesting complex customer enquiries.
Solution – Phase 2:
Other areas of customer service identified to be automated including handling 90%+ of emails – dealing with cancellations, amendments and FAQs. IntelliAgent trained to fully and automatically deal with these enquiries 24×7 vastly improving customer experience.
Challenges
State of Automation
- Manual
- Manual
Issues
- Expensive manual processing
- Large volume of repetitive admin work dealing with Virtual Inventory bookings
- Poor employee job satisfaction
- Need to massively scale operation up for peak season and down again afterwards
Phase 1
State of Automation
- Automated
- Manual
Benefits
- Increased employee satisfaction
- 60% reduction in cost of processing Virtual Inventory bookings
- No need to recruit, train and manage temporary staff over summer peak massively reduced
- Customer bookings confirmed rapidly and dealt with 24x7 for better customer experience
Phase 2
State of Automation
- Automated
- Automated
Benefits
- 90%+ of customer service dealt with near instantaneously, 24x7
- Further reduction in manual dealing with all aspects of customer service
- Human agents free to focus on more complex bookings such as multiple parties traveling together
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