In our current series on the state of the travel and tourism sectors, we’re looking at some of the biggest issues currently affecting the industry, and how businesses can adapt to face those challenges. In the last blog, we looked at the skills challenges facing an industry that has already taken a huge battering this decade. In this piece, Santiago Rossi, Operations VP, looks at the role automation can play in improving customer experience for the travel industry.
If it’s done right, automation could be transformational for the travel industry. From seat selection to a schedule enquiry, a booking cancellation or baggage policy question, there are plenty of ways in which thoughtful use of automation can improve the customer journey (before they even make their actual journey.
Whether it’s the customer dreading a marathon wait time to talk to an agent simply to check their flight times, or the travel brand keen to free up their agents for higher-value interactions with their customers, the key lies in analysing the customer journey and working out which repetitive, low-value elements could be replaced more easily and efficiently using automation.
Making sure you get automated bang for your buck
From the industry’s perspective, there’s widespread awareness in the sector that travel CX has to embrace smart automation. From a customer’s point of view, these days you expect to be waiting in long queue times, demand fuelled by a resurgent desire to see the world, an appetite that was suppressed for several years by the pandemic but has returned this year more voracious than ever.
Managing the peaks and troughs of that demand can be extremely challenging for contact centers, so anything that can get customers the answers they’re after, more quickly and easily, has to be welcome. It would be a brave leader in the industry who thinks the customer service issues that have created those long wait times can be addressed solely by putting more advisors into bricks-and-mortar call centers (and that’s notwithstanding the need to hire the right people with the right skill set which we discussed earlier in the series).
All of that said, making sure that you get every single automated bang for your buck isn’t a simple matter either. At Webhelp, we have a team of over a thousand consultants, software engineers and conversational designers, and over the years of working with clients to reshape customer journeys using smart automation and CX design, our team has learned a few lessons along the way.
How automation fits into your CX
We think about how automation fits into the customer journey at three different stages. Our aim is to weave intelligent automation throughout, liberating the agent and customer to have better-informed conversations and a richer customer experience.
The first stage is the ‘in-front’ task which replaces the agent with a machine. Speaking to a machine that not only understands what we said but what we meant (think Siri, Alex, Cortana or chatbots) is now increasingly accepted as part of the customer experience mix.
Next up we talk about automation ‘alongside’ the agent: these are solutions that can boost the performance of an agent during a customer interaction. For example real-time speech transcription can automatically detect when certain products or processes are being discussed, and pro-actively display the relevant knowledge articles or workflows to the agent in the conversation, reducing handling times and improving the customer experience.
Finally, ‘behind-the-agent’ solutions can automate transactions and processes that have been triggered directly by the agent or customer. It also introduces opportunities for automation to improve the efficiency of shared services which support frontline operations, which might include Finance, HR, Resource Planning, Reporting etc.
The technology itself is a red herring
Let’s start with the fundamentals. A common misconception when people talk about finding and deploying technology solutions for their business is to focus on the technology rather than the problem itself – and the behaviours driving it. Ultimately though, it’s finding and fixing those problems which will unlock the most value.
What you should be focusing on upfront are specific use cases and how to design solutions for them. Invest time in how the interactions you’re designing are going to feel for the customers. Take chatbots for example. They play a big role in supporting digital transformation as customers change their contact approach from call to chat.
Part of their success – and customers’ embrace of them – has been the way they have been supported once launched so that any exceptions to what it knows are monitored and it’s then taught new “answers” for those types of exceptions. Chatbots can also be linked to other processes, so for example, after you’ve made a seat reservation you might be taken to a payment screen to complete payment.
Look at working with a technology partner who can forensically go through your data and use it to identify those opportunities that deliver cost efficiencies and improve key metrics such as Average Handling Time, Net Promoter Score, First Call Resolution, your conversion rate for sales – depending on what you want to achieve. Once you start there, working out how to design the process and technology to enable it is a comparatively simple next step.
The best hand-off is the one you don’t even notice
Given the complexity of multi-channel CX, it’s no wonder that the holy grail is a seamless, branded experience, one in which customers barely notice (or need to care) about which parts of the journey are automated and which are human.
See the big picture first
Earlier in this piece, we talked about the need to zero in on the customer data first, analysing it to see where the bottlenecks and problems are in the customer journey. Ideally, you want to look at the problem first, then select the correct tool. Instead of just buying tech to fix a problem, brands should be looking to invest time and effort in upfront solution design, based on the customer’s needs. As the saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
The law of unintended consequences applies here too. The risk is in thinking that a new technology platform will fix one problem – reducing overheads in one part of the business for example. But in doing so you might have materially damaged the CX in another part of the customer journey, which brings its own costs.
How can CX automation be most effective in the customer journey?
The scope for liberation via automation is often larger than organisations first realise. Automation can make self-serve so quick and easy for customers that it legitimately feels like a customer benefit rather than a tiresome imposition while simultaneously reducing the volume of calls routed to contact centers.
Our own Telecats solution uses speech routing to optimize customer journeys by connecting callers with the best solution for them, whether that’s self-service or talking to an agent.
By automating call categorization and logging, the volume of those calls can also be handled much more effectively, helping you reduce your Average Handling Time (AHT). It could also mean digitally automating low-value interactions using chatbots or mailbots and using attended and unattended Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to help agents manage workflow. Machine learning can be used to overcome multi-region language constraints for example, by leveraging machine translation to cover more niche languages (which are difficult to find translators for).
At Webhelp we’ve seen for ourselves that the rewards can be substantial, with (on average) 20% of agent-customer interactions able to be automated. Our work with clients has seen automation reduce AHT by 45 seconds. Companies have been able to reduce their costs by 30% by using machine translation to cover languages that are difficult to find translators for.
What does the future look like?
Even as the travel industry begins to embrace automation, the next generation of innovation is on the horizon. Whether it’s the use of applied AI to create virtual advisors who will work in tandem with their still-infinitely more advanced human counterparts or the next great leap in machine learning, the future is bright. And, increasingly, automated.
Follow our travel series or simply get in touch below if you’d like to talk about how to design and deliver great travel CX.
