5 Ways CCaaS Benefits Agent Management in the Travel Industry

How CCaaS Streamlines the Management of Travel Call Centre Agents

From ensuring work is efficiently distributed across your workforce to monitoring the experience your team offers to your customers, there are a lot of challenges to be faced when managing agent activity within your travel contact centre. Should your business encounter an increase in demand, whether as a result of the business attracting more customers over all or dealing with peak seasons, these challenges can become even more complicated.

CCaaS is a powerful communications solution, that goes beyond simply enabling teams to connect with each other and customers in a more productive way. It is packed with features, tools and applications to allow you to streamline the management of your agents.

We’re going to explore some of the key features included in CCaaS solutions that can take the stress away from managing your agent activity for improved performance and enhanced customer experiences.

So, if optimising your call centre activity, empowering your agents with the right tools to provide the best service in the industry are goals you’re looking to achieve – keep reading.

What is CCaaS?

Before we jump into the key benefits of CCaaS for agent management, we’re going to take you through a whistle-stop tour through what this technology actually is and how it works.

CCaaS stands for Contact Centre as a Service and it is an all-in-one communications and customer experience solution. It unifies a range of communication channels, including:

• Voice
• Chat
• Email
• Video calls
• Social media

Alongside these high-quality communication channels, CCaaS also includes a plethora of first-class customer management and experience tools, such as:

• Intelligent IVR
• AI tools
• In-depth analytics
• Comprehensive reporting
• Call recording

The solution is internet-based, so no need for time-consuming installation of physical lines and, once onboarded, CCaaS systems can be accessed from a variety of devices, including desk phones, laptops, PCs and more; all users need to do is simply log into the platform and away they go!

So, now we’ve got an idea of what this technology is and how it works, let’s explore how the features of CCaaS can benefit agent management within your call centre.

Benefits of CCaaS Features for Agent Management

1)    AI Call Tools

Alongside having the ability to integrate a range of communication channels, productivity applications and customer experience tools, CCaaS can be empowered with artificial intelligence technology. This technology holds the power to enable smart workflows and handle increased call traffic without increasing the number of agents within your call centre.

For example, integrating AI within a CCaaS can allow you to disperse traffic across a mix of human agents and automated options that allow a customer to self-serve or work with an AI tool to find the information they need. This saves the time of your human agents for more urgent queries, allowing you to serve large numbers of customers without overloading human agents.

Sentiment Analysis

AI-powered sentiment analysis, can understand the urgency of a customer’s query or the severity of their attitude and prioritise their interaction accordingly. Through leveraging machine learning, AI can identify which customer queries need to be escalated quickly to a human agent due to the customer having a critical issue or displaying frustrated emotions and pass those whose queries are less critical or who have a more positive demeanour through automated options or place them in a queue.

This enables your call centre to distribute call traffic across both automated and human-powered options, so your customers have access to the support they need and human agents being reserved for the queries where a human touch is necessary, reducing overwhelm and burnout.

Chatbots

Offering chatbots, again, separates simple queries that can be solved through an automated system, prioritising more complex queries for human agents. This can reduce unnecessary call traffic entering into your call centre, allowing your agents to have more time to service your customers more effectively and less likely to be affected by burnout.

For example, if customers want to make a simple query about their booking, such as “when is my next payment due?”, this can be handled by the chatbot. This means that the time of contact centre agents isn’t taken up by a large number of quick, easy enquiries, so their time is prioritised for more high value tasks.

2)    Intelligent IVR

Similar to the benefits we’ve outlined above, intelligent IVR systems within your CCaaS solution can help to streamline call traffic travelling into your business. This can be achieved through routing calls to relevant agents who may have a particular specialism, such as complaints, group bookings or package holidays, that means they are the most qualified for that particular query. This reduces the need to pass calls through multiple agents, which isn’t helpful for customers who will grow frustrated quickly or the agent who will inevitably have to deal with this frustration!

Let’s take a travel insurance business for example. Customers will contact the business for a variety of reasons, including taking out new policies, renewals, claims and queries. When customers call into the call centre they will be greeted by an automated message that asks them to categorise the reason for their call either through voice recognition or by entering a number via their phone’s keypad. Once the reason of the call has been identified, the intelligent IVR will route the call to the most relevant agent, which means the chances of a caller being passed around to multiple agents before getting the answers they need is minimal.

3)    In-depth Analytics

When it comes to monitoring the performance of your team, it can be difficult having complete visibility over their activities without access to rich data. Without effective monitoring, it’s difficult to ensure workloads are distributed efficiently leading to agent burnout, sluggish service and negative customer experiences.

In contrast, having access to in-depth analytics can help you to build a vivid picture of your agent activity, so you can effectively manage agent performance, distribute workloads to improve efficiency and avoid burnout and ensure that your team are providing the best possible service to your customers.

CCaaS allows access to rich data and analytics that covers key metrics, such as:

• Average handling time
• Hours worked by agents
• First response time
• Queue times
• Customer satisfaction

With clear visibility over your agents’ activity, you can make better strategic decisions, highlight areas for improvement or opportunities to hire more staff, as well as manage your team’s performance.

4)    Comprehensive Reporting

As we’ve just explored, having access to in-depth data is incredibly beneficial for contact centres, however having so much data at your fingertips can feel overwhelming, if not presented in a productive manner. CCaaS solutions can offer this rich data in a format that works best for you, so you can benefit from the information you need, without the distraction of information you don’t need.

Create customised wall boards displaying key metrics to provide clear visibility of your team’s performance, wait times and traffic across social channels. Should a metric dip below a target threshold, for example a wait time exceeds 10 minutes, you can take action quickly to fix the problem. With easy visibility of your teams performance, you can instantly make changes to improve your service, reduce customer frustration and provide the best experiences.

Curate reports tailored to the specific needs of your business. From identifying areas for training or improvement within your team to gathering data to help you make better business decisions and take your strategy to the next level.

5)    Call Recording and Monitoring

When you’re managing a busy team, it’s impossible to have eyes and ears everywhere in order to keep on top of your team’s performance and handle any issues that may be arising…or is it? With call recording and monitoring you have access qualitative data that provides insights into the service you’re providing, evidence in the instance of an issue or incident and useful resources for training purposes.

Service Insights

Let’s say for example, that you’re receiving a number of complaints about agents taking a while to offer answers on holiday bookings or not having the information they need to hand when customers are enquiring about their trip. You can take a quota of call recordings to audit in order to assess what’s causing this problem and identify ways to rectify it. For example, your team may need access to a better system that offers a centralised point of information, such as an integrated CRM system within a CCaaS solution.

Incident Evidence

Holidays and trips are an expensive investment for customers. For many people, their yearly holiday is their main luxury expense of the year. So, when a mistake occurs that could jeopardise their travel plans, this could be a costly incident to rectify if you don’t have access to the facts.

For example, let’s say that Mr and Mrs Jones called up their local travel agent and booked a trip to Mallorca for two weeks at the beginning of June. Or so they thought. When their confirmation came through, the dates specified are the first two weeks of July. Understandably frustrated, the couple call their travel agent to try and rectify the issue. The agent points out that according to their records, the couple requested the first two weeks in July, not June, and the mistake was on their part not the fault of the travel company and if they want to swap the dates they will need to pay a cancellation fee. However, Mr and Mrs Jones are certain that when they called the company to book the trip, they definitely booked the first two weeks in June and the agent must have made a mistake. Without access to definitive evidence, this is a case of one party’s word against the other.

If the travel company didn’t have access to a communication solution that offered call recording, it could be a hard task trying to discover who was at fault. However, they have access to high-quality call recording. After escalating the incident to a manager, who searched for a recording of the original call it was identified that Mr and Mrs Jones did in fact mistakenly request the first two weeks in July rather than June.

Without access to this information, the travel company may have had to accept responsibility or accept the loss of business caused by the frustrated customers, despite the fact that the incident was the customer’s fault.

PCI Compliance

Offering the ability to make payments over the phone is incredibly convenient for customers, however ensuring stringent security for this process is vital. Travel companies looking to utilise this functionality will need to follow the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Intelligent CCaaS solutions have secure payment processing tools that are PCI compliant, allowing your business to accept payments securely over the phone.

Training

When it comes to onboarding new staff, what better way to prepare them for the customers they are likely to encounter than utilising recordings of real customer calls during their onboarding? From gathering an idea of the type of situations they may have to deal with to developing de-escalation skills that will be vital when servicing customers who are difficult, frustrated or abusive.

The travel industry is an ever-changing sector, so if you’re looking to offer the best experience for your customers, it’s important to keep your team’s knowledge and skills up to date with relevant training. Utilising customer calls, as examples of skills the team is demonstrating well and calls where the agent could have done a better job, is incredibly useful for improving your team’s knowledge and therefore improving your overall level of service.

Elite Group: The Destination for Intelligent Communication Solutions

When it comes to empowering your team with the right technology to get the job done, there’s only one place to go. Our specialists have decades of experience supporting travel businesses like yours to reach their goals, improve productivity and provide the service that exceeds customer expectations.

If you’re ready to take your travel business to the next level with CCaaS solutions, fill out our contact form today or give us a call on 0344 875 8880 for a comprehensive, no-obligation consultation today.