5 Simple Tips to Improve Customer Experience in the Travel & Leisure Industry

4 MIN. READ

Does your contact center provide travel or travel-related support services to customers? To enhance your customer's experience with your contact center personnel, consider the following value-adding tips that will help retain your business for years.

Empower Your Agents

Have you been experiencing a high volume of customer complaints or negative public reviews?

The best way to improve your customer's experience in the Travel and Leisure industry is by educating and empowering your customer-facing agents. It is critical that all agents know the ins and outs of your company so that they can answer traveler's questions to the best of their ability on each and every call.

Agent Knowledge Is Power

Empower your agents to provide value-added details to customers like confirmation numbers, cancellation policies and other important travel-related information that can save customers time or money.

Many travel agents feel limited in what packages or services they can offer customers. As a result, these agents may provide a less than satisfying experience due to their perceived limitations.

Empowering your agents means that contact center leadership has been trained in providing your agents with the authority (and the necessary tools) to achieve first call resolution.

For example, provide your agents with the resources to adjust package prices and apply discount codes to drive customer satisfaction in escalated situations that may otherwise cost you a cancellation or a bad public review.

Go the Extra Mile for Travelers

Train your agents to go above and beyond their duty when handling customer contacts. Take a look at a few examples of how travel contact center agents can go the extra mile for their travel callers.

1. Scheduling call-backs with customers whose issues may require long hold times or be transferred to multiple departments.
2. Providing customers traveling by air with important value-added details like why they should always book directly with an airline when making flight reservations.
3. Waiving customary fees and charges when extenuating circumstances apply and even simply for customer satisfaction in some cases.
4. Providing customers with resolutions to issues that arise in a timely and professional manner.

Odds are your agents will never speak to the same callers again, but the relationship they built by demonstrating knowledge and being extra helpful will result in steady or increased revenue for your business for years.

Keep Your Customers Out of the "Loop"

Have you ever called customer service and been transferred a dozen times, only to find that you've returned to the dreaded "main menu"?

This has become the norm for many customers who call a contact center for service or support, and they absolutely hate it.

To make your customers' contacts as painless as possible, empower your agents to act on behalf of customers when dealing with vendors or third parties. Demonstrate to your customers that their issues matter to you.

Provide your agents training that shows them how working with the airline, hotel or other vendor representatives directly is much more effective than working with a third party.

Cross-Trained Agents Are the Travel Industry's New Normal

Today's travel companies are training their contact center agents to address customer service issues from A to Z. These "super agents" address all levels of customer issues, eliminating the need for departmental transfers and extended wait time for customers.

Contact agents today are highly trained professionals equipped with the tools to help them resolve most common and some uncommon customer concerns. These tools include:

• SMS messaging
• Live chat support
• Chatbot
• Email support
• Social media support

Some advanced call centers even equip their agents with tools via push notifications and links that can guide customers to self-help support options like tutorials, how-to's and videos related to resolving common issues on their own.

Consider adding some of these tools and strategies to your own travel contact center operations to see an improvement in customer satisfaction, increased bookings, positive reviews and word-of-mouth referrals.

How We Can Help

Call Center Optimization Group offers a full suite of services for contact centers in the travel industry. We help travel call centers improve their customer's experience by providing education and training for call center agents, call center leaders and decision-makers. We offer services for call center enhancement, including:

• Free Assessment throughout the entire outsourcing life-cycle, to help your company get a solid and experienced call center partner for your business needs, in record time.
• Agent training
• Leadership training
• Workforce management solutions
• Performance improvement
• Process improvement
• Sales optimization

Our goal is to help you to improve your travel call center operations and travel customer experience by providing education, training, software and tools that ensure that every customer experience with your brand is a memorable one.

Benefits of Partnering with Call Center Optimization Group

• Increased customer satisfaction
• Reduced agent attrition rates
• Increased bookings/revenue
• More effective call center Leadership

Interested in learning more about how you can improve your travel call center? Contact one of our specialists for a free travel call center assessment today!