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Journey Past, part of Hornblower Group, is Australia’s main experiential tourism group. Headquartered in Adelaide, it operates 13 manufacturers and experiences spanning the nation. The corporate’s general technique is to “have a buyer expertise that’s second-to-none — from the second they first interact with the corporate to plan their expertise, to after they return house on the finish of their travels — no matter what Journey Past journey you might be reserving.”Nonetheless, the corporate’s disparate expertise methods had been proving to be a hinderance in its dedication to persistently ship unmatched providers and experiences to prospects. As its enterprise diversified, together with its personal acquisition by Hornblower Group in early 2022, Journey Past inherited a spread of disparate expertise methods, together with six completely different telephone methods and an outdated contact heart that was solely servicing Journey Past’s rail journeys. The remaining manufacturers within the firm’s portfolio had been utilizing primary telephone performance for buyer enquiries and reservations.Madhumita Mazumdar, GM of data and communications expertise at Journey Past
istock“The completely different communication options had been unable to offer an built-in 360-degree buyer view, which made it troublesome to make sure a constant, unrivalled buyer expertise throughout all 13 tourism ventures, and some other manufacturers Journey Past might add to its portfolio sooner or later. The absence of superior contact heart options and analytics additional prevented us from driving distinctive buyer expertise. Apart from, we couldn’t allow work-from-anywhere, on any system functionality, for workers,” says Madhumita Mazumdar, GM of data and communications expertise at Journey Past. These challenges pressured the corporate to transition to a contemporary cloud-based communication platform.A number of communication options trigger a number of challengesBecause Past Journey operates within the experiential tourism market, offering a personalised, seamless buyer expertise is crucial — one thing its earlier communications methods lacked, Mazumdar says.“For example, our prepare journeys get bought out a 12 months previous to their launch. Due to this fact, once we launch a brand new season, there’s a large quantity of calls from our prospects and brokers. The present system lacked callback mechanism, resulting in callers ready in queue for so long as 40 minutes, which adversely impacted their expertise,” she says, including that there was additionally no method to prioritize sure calls over others.The present system additionally lacked analytical functionality to offer any buyer insights and it wasn’t built-in with Past Journey’s CRM. In consequence, representatives interacting with a buyer didn’t know whether or not the client had traveled with the corporate earlier than. “The communication between us and the client was transactional as an alternative of being personalised,” Mazumdar says.For the reason that current methods had been very previous, they couldn’t be managed remotely. In case of an outage, the corporate needed to ship a neighborhood individual to rectify the on-site telephone system, which may take a few hours. Throughout this time, prospects had been unable to name Journey Past.“The IVR was additionally not standardized throughout the corporate. Because the IVRs had been recorded in voices of staff from completely different enterprise items, a caller had no thought they had been a part of the identical enterprise,” says Mazumdar.Incoming calls to Past Journey’s toll-free numbers had been additionally including to the operational price. “We paid per-minute on the calls obtained to our toll-free numbers. The excessive name volumes meant large prices for us. Even when the decision was hanging within the queue, it was costing us each minute,” she says.Implementing a consolidated communications platformTo overcome the bottlenecks and drive buyer engagement to the subsequent stage, Journey Past launched a contact heart transformation, step one of which was to ascertain a standard unified communications (UC) platform throughout the enterprise and combine it with a brand new contact heart (CC) answer. After evaluating a number of UC and CC options, Journey Past selected RingCentral’s built-in UCaaS and CCaaS platforms — RingCentral MVP and Contact Middle.“We began evaluating a number of distributors within the first quarter of 2021. The software program analysis course of took three to 5 months after which the implementation began in August 2021. We went reside in October 2021,” Mazumdar says. The complete SaaS answer was hosted on AWS.The corporate took this chance to shift to gentle telephones and headsets by eliminating all bodily telephones. “We bought good high quality noise-cancelling headsets, which was the one {hardware} we invested in considerably,” says Mazumdar. “Though we had premium assist from RingCentral, we determined to be taught all the things in regards to the answer and take full management over it. So, whereas the mixing and prebuild was fully executed by RingCentral, over time we educated a number of individuals within the group on the answer. In hindsight, this was the very best factor we did,” says Mazumdar, who introduced in two devoted IT sources with telephone system background for the brand new answer.“Totally different enterprise items inside the firm work in another way. For example, the height hours for one enterprise might be completely different from these of one other enterprise, which impacts the way you arrange the decision flows. It’s not one primary normal rule that might be arrange for all companies throughout the corporate. With in-house understanding of the answer, we had full management over the answer and had been in a position to make modifications, refinements, and sophisticated prioritization guidelines to it ourselves with out relying on the answer supplier,” she says.Cloud-based answer delivers buyer visibility and valueConnecting a number of companies with a standard communications platform to ship constant customer support throughout the group has yielded compelling enterprise advantages to Journey Past.A key benefit of the tight integration between UC and CC is the customer support operation’s accessibility for your complete Journey Past group.“At a nationwide built-in stage, we now have material specialists in every of our experiences out there to ship unrivalled buyer expertise, with economies of scale. So, if one group is below duress when it comes to name volumes, the decision might be overflowed and picked up rapidly by a advisor with secondary experience in that model,” says Mazumdar.Journey Past is supporting its buyer expertise drive by integrating the CC answer with its CRM to develop omni-channel CX capabilities and construct in direction of a 360-degree view of the client.“We’re build up our ‘Know You Buyer’ technique, which begins with our customer support brokers realizing who you might be whenever you name any of our Journey Past manufacturers,” says Mazumdar. “Callers who’ve travelled with us earlier than, have their telephone quantity in our CRM. After they name, their information pop up. The manager can take a look at the client’s historical past with the corporate and the communication between them turns into much more personalised. The built-in view of the client additionally helps to cross promote. For example, if an individual is reserving a prepare journey from Adelaide however our government is aware of that he’s coming from Sydney, he can promote him one other journey in Sydney.”The system additionally permits for name prioritisation. “In case you are a journey agent, and also you’ve put by way of $10 million with our enterprise, we all know that, so your name will get prioritised and routed to be answered by probably the most skilled agent out there and by the quickest method potential. Precedence is essential,” she says, including that the brand new system additionally gives prospects call-back performance, thereby offering vital financial savings on Past Jouney’s toll-free quantity prices.The opposite main benefit is the scalability and distant capabilities of the cloud-based platform. The answer permits Journey Past to run operations 24×7 with centralised administration and distributed customers, working from anyplace, on any system. This has additionally given Journey Past the chance to recruit for expertise in different places outdoors the market round its Adelaide workplace.Journey Past has additionally rolled out the answer’s workforce administration performance to raised align agent availability with buyer demand. The superior suggestions capabilities enable Journey Past to measure buyer web promoter scores (NPS) proper right down to the advisor stage. That NPS performance will then be built-in into Salesforce, enhancing the 360-degree view of the client expertise.The answer’s high quality administration performance is offering Journey Past with a stage of automation to make sure the contact fundamentals are being accomplished, permitting leaders to give attention to scoring the extra advanced or intangible parts of buyer engagements — delivering a recording of each the decision and what’s occurring on display on the identical time. “High quality analytics completes the image when it comes to all the things we have to see from a expertise hole perspective,” says Mazumdar. Journey Past has deployed the UC answer to all companies nationally. The CC answer has been rolled out on the firm’ rail division and Rottnest Specific whereas onboarding for the opposite companies is in progress.
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