Top customer experience tips for travel firms

Joe Brown, GM of EMEA for RightNow Technologies, shares his top tips with the travel industry to ensure superb customer experience is provided despite the recent spike in bookings…

By Joe Brown, RightNow Technologies

With the weather going from bad to worse, many of us are left wondering whether there will be a summer at all. Booking last minute trips abroad seems the best and only option to see the sun, especially with some of the fantastic offers being put forward by the travel industry. This trend was confirmed recently by ABTA, now known as The Travel Association, who announced they had seen an increase in bookings across the majority of travel agents.

An unexpected increase in bookings can be a strain for travel agencies, and more often than not the pressure results in the customer receiving a negative experience.

Negative experiences can result in potential customers not purchasing their desired flights, or even never purchasing a holiday via a particular company again - not a viable business option for those travel companies that want to succeed in a competitive market.

Trends in the sector are being driven by customer shopping habits. First, there is demand for low cost travel, which requires travel organisations to reduce their operational costs in order to compete. Then, there is the popularity of travel websites, posing the challenge of how to make sites ‘stickier’ and move customers from looking to booking.

In order to deliver a superb experience and differentiate themselves in the market, no matter what time of the year it is or if we in the UK are having another dire summer, travel companies must consider the following five top tips. This advice includes best practice recommendations designed to help organisations address the internal and external challenges they face:

1. Put the customer in control
Give access to an individual customer portal/travel manager area where they can see all booking information, e-tickets and any question and answer sets. This area can also give customers ownership to opt-in and out of offers, destination alerts and latest news and allows them to change personal details and preferences.

2. Tie online, contact centre and marketing operations together
The best results come from integrating these so that customer information gathered in the online and contact centre operations drives targeted marketing campaigns, which can then be effectively supported by these operations as they go live.

3. Website usability is critical
Ensure that websites are knowledge-empowered so information pushed to the customer is relevant to the web page they are viewing. Provide clear signposting from informational to transactional pages. Organise information, don’t look to limit it but rather use topics so that customers can find what they are looking for. Learn from customer interactions and refine content and search capabilities to cater for as wide an audience as possible.

4. Empower contact centre agents to become trusted advisors and improve customer satisfaction
Provide them with a single-point of entry into a 360-degree view of all customer interactions from where they can see all associated bookings, track leads and brochure requests, see all online marketing activity and increase revenue by providing offers based on customer profile.

5. Address internal communication
Customer service agents often feel they are the last to know about decisions that directly impact on their interaction with customers, such as activity that may lead to a spike in contact centre calls. Combat this by simplifying and easing the sharing of knowledge between different business functions.

Joe Brown is GM of EMEA for RightNow Technologies