Freedom is for humans - queue management is for robots

I had never imagined that I would have robots for colleagues. But now I do. I can’t have a coffee with them, but I can count on them to be team players.

Growing pains – and a pandemic

At Consolidador.com, we have been fortunate enough to be able to expand our business into new markets over the last years, despite the challenges brought on by the pandemic. Expanding is of course very gratifying, but as we grew, the number of queue messages and manual work grew with us, and anyone in the travel industry will know that managing your queues is a manual and time-consuming business – especially when we are strained on staff and in peak periods. So, while we were happy to grow, it was also making queue management an increasing concern and additional workload for us.

And then the pandemic struck, and huge amounts of schedule changes and cancellations became the order of the day. This, combined with our new business, made the volume of information that we received from each airline every day on our queues reach astronomical proportions.

The pandemic also brought a feeling of insecurity to our customers’ passengers. As a consolidator, our clients are the travel agencies and not the traveler. This layered value chain can complicate the communication flow to travelers about the changes and information received in the PNRs. So, it’s really important for us that our customers receive all the information the airline sends us as soon as possible, so they can communicate with their travelers. As you can imagine, time is essential in this matter.

We are proud to be a client and service-oriented company with an experienced team, and our objective was to continue to be valued for this. However, with an increase of nearly 50% in incoming requests or notifications that we needed to read through, prioritize and analyze for appropriate actions, this became a real challenge. There were a lot of cancellations and travel agents were concerned about the situation. This accelerated our search for a solution to improve our procedures.

Automate what can be automated

With work restrictions and the increasing workload, having automation in our queue flows was a lifesaver. Without it, I don't think that we could be able to keep our clients informed of all cancellations and schedule changes.

Queue management is not a complicated task, but it is an important and necessary one, however NOT what we consider our human staff SHOULD?be spending their time on. It takes human staff away from what only humans can do - which is to be there for our customers, go that extra mile, and make our customers truly feel that we have time for them and are close to them. We pride ourselves on a strong focus on service, and we do not want to waste our staff’s time cleaning queues. And let’s be frank, it’s pretty boring too, and does not make staff feel their expertise being put to good use and bring value.

Now, with robotics, we have “someone” doing those administrative tasks as well as we do, but generally faster. Without robotics, we needed one person to spend at least 50% of their time only sifting through the queues daily. The Amadeus solutions allowed us to avoid the accumulation of queues and have our clients be informed in just a few minutes without using valuable human resources.

Tailormade solution

I truly appreciated how easily the robotics can be configurated to fit our procedures. All businesses are different, and we cannot rely on a “one-size-fits-all” setup.

The customization capabilities also enabled us to integrate robotics with other solutions we have in place, for example sending truly customized messages and notifications to our customers in a high-quality and efficient way and promptly.

Leveraging technology is the key to success

Consolidador.com as a company, and I especially as Transformation Manager, are always on the hunt for technological solutions that can make the work easier for our expert team and give them more flexibility to let them work on what they do best and in areas where their expertise is of most value to our clients. This is our key to success, and we have a clear strategy for investing in innovation and technology. This partnership with Amadeus Robotics was one more step in the right direction.

So, trust technology. Trust robotics. They are your best ally to let your team focus on customers and business results. Automate what can be automated, your team has better things to do than messing around with manual queue management.?

By: Vania Henriques - Transformation Manager, Consolidador.com