Improving the Travel Customer Experience with On-Demand Call Center Solutions

Delivering a premium travel customer experience requires a proactive, engaging, personalized strategy. Here’s how the on-demand model can help you achieve it.

In today’s fast-paced, hyper-connected society, offering a premium customer experience (CX) is more essential than ever. Today’s consumer expects excellent, instant, problem-solving service and expertise—and they won’t hesitate to take their business elsewhere if they don’t get it from you.

For the travel industry, this is even more true. Travelers want instant contact to customer service representatives, particularly if delays or cancellations occur—and they do, with some frequency. Travel customers also expect proactive service; they want to be contacted well in advance of any developments that could disrupt their travel plans.

Travelers want instant contact to customer service representatives, particularly if delays or cancellations occur—and they do, with some frequency.

In short, whether they’re traveling for business or pleasure, customers require a proactive, all-fronts approach that includes not just comprehensive phone responsiveness but also availability across all of today’s primary communications channels—including voice, text, social media and many others.

Fortunately, the modern contact center makes this a highly achievable goal. Here are a few ways that partnering with an on-demand contact center can help you offer a travel customer experience that’s truly worthy of your brand and your customers.

7 Ways to Improve Your Travel Customer Experience with On-Demand Contact Center Solutions

1. Go Omnichannel. If you don’t already have touchpoints in place for customers to contact you via all the day’s most popular channels—think Twitter, Instagram, text message and all the other places people now congregate—then it’s time to put a strategy in place that does so. An effective travel customer experience doesn’t just include all the channels your customers use. It also should integrate them into a single strategy, eliminating disjointed areas and interaction siloes.

2. Get Flexible. When today’s customers can’t reach you via the phone—thanks to long hold times, network inactivity or any of a myriad of other reasons that could be the result of poor planning or an uncontrollable act of nature—they’re often quick to hit up social media and let everyone know how you’ve failed them. You can circumvent this type of potential PR disaster by partnering with a contact center provider with enough high-performing agents available to make sure customer requests aren’t just heard but addressed as quickly as possible.

3. Offer Access to Real Agents. During times of crisis, travelers experience high stress, and an automated response isn’t going to cut it. You need a personal touch, delivered via reps with specific skills in the travel customer experience—high-touch agents who offer empathy and friendliness to customers, and who have a shared cultural background and superior knowledge of your services. Today, dedicated contact center service providers, such as Working Solutions, can provide access to premium U.S.- and Canadian-based contact center agents much more affordably than in the days of the traditional call center.

4. Customize Your Communications. An Experian study found that personalized emails generate six times more revenue and greater rates of transaction than impersonal ones. Yet, only 7% of brands actually use this method to communicate. When it comes to travel, though, personalization and customization are essential. And you can accomplish this by simply asking them the right questions. What type of traveler are they: Solo? Family-oriented? Romantic getaway? Do they prefer group tours or privacy? Are they looking for getaways in nature or the big city? The better you can answer these questions, the better you can help your customers have great travel experiences.

An Experian study found that personalized emails generate six times more revenue and greater rates of transaction than impersonal ones. Yet, only 7% of brands actually use this method to communicate.

5. Optimize Your Performance. Though self-service isn’t the best practice with one-on-one communications, in other areas, a bit of automation and analytical insight is the right approach. Performance monitoring and real-time corrective action will improve any customer experience in the long run, filtering out inefficiencies and helping you anticipate times of higher utilization. Partnering with a contact center solutions provider that monitors and tracks key performance indicators (KPIs) assures confidence you’re not just meeting, but rather anticipating, your customers’ needs well into the future.

6. Get Proactive. Today, it’s best not to wait for customers to contact you—you can set the tone of the message yourself by engaging with the platforms where they congregate (particularly social media). And being proactive doesn’t just mean initiating communications; it means a better capacity for damage control, too. People often air their unhappy experiences on social media. If you’re proactive and engaged, you can address such comments before they “go viral”—and better learn, in real time, just what your customers expect from their experiences with you.

7. Reward Accordingly. Rewarding your most faithful or engaged customers will help ensure they stay loyal and give other customers an incentive to develop a closer relationship with you. Plus, travelers have come to expect such rewards: Consider the many credit card companies that compete to offer lucrative benefits for frequent travelers. Also look at the potential benefits of sharing stories of those happy customers on your social media channels or telling them in the emails sent to other customers.

If your current travel customer experience can’t deliver the points listed above, it may be time to call in the experts!