How can you determine what defines customer service quality for your customers? While expectations vary based on customer demographics and their history with your brand, industry standards are a concrete factor.
In healthcare, customers expect empathetic support. In finance, confidentiality is a top priority. For the travel and hospitality industries—such as airlines, travel agencies, and hotels—accuracy and efficiency are crucial.
Let’s explore why these standards matter and how you can train your support team to meet them.
Nowadays, everything happens super fast all around us. So, even subconsciously, we as customers expect that if an issue occurs, it should be resolved right away.
It is therefore essential to provide fast and efficient service. To be able to do that in the travel industry, which is very complex, contrary to the belief that you should straight away know the answer, we believe you should be extra efficient instead in quickly finding the information you need and defining what alternative would be best for your customer. There are many different options in some cases, and almost none in others, so you have to be prepared to think outside of the box and very efficiently place yourself in the customer’s shoes. After all, leisure travel typically accounts for around 55% to 60% of total travel, meaning customers would expect to have a great time all the time, from booking the trip, until coming back. And you have to be with them along all the way.
Challenges in delivering quality support for travel and hospitality companies
1. The serious consequences of misinformation
Imagine you’re packing for your flight and contact the airline to ask if you can bring a child’s stroller for free with your tickets. They confirm it’s no problem. However, when you arrive at the airport, you’re told there’s an additional fee to check it in. This misinformation costs you time and money and may result in the airline losing your future business.
2. The high cost of compensations
Consider a scenario where construction work disrupts the comfort of guests at a hotel. Several rooms are affected, leading many guests to request compensation for their inconvenience. Your support team must manage within the allocated compensation budget despite repeated complaints. Should you prioritize retaining these guests for future stays and avoiding negative reviews, or absorb the additional costs?
3. The challenge of onboarding new agents
In travel and hospitality, agents must quickly learn specialized software and handle a wide range of products and policies, making the onboarding process more demanding and lengthier than in other industries. Given the high turnover rate of customer service agents across all sectors, this remains an ongoing challenge.
4. The limitations of AI and automation
While automating support tasks with chatbots, smart-routing, and agent assist tools has significantly reduced workloads for many support teams, the travel and hospitality industry faces unique challenges. The nuanced issues that arise during a trip require AI solutions to be rigorously trained on quality data. However, these technologies often struggle to handle the complexity and variety of potential problems and their consequences.
For instance, an Air Canada chatbot recently made headlines for incorrectly informing a passenger about their refund eligibility. Despite the airline’s argument that the chatbot was responsible, a civil-resolutions tribunal ruled in favor of the passenger. This case sets a precedent and serves as a warning to companies using AI without safeguards against misinformation.
5. Ensuring customer data confidentiality
Maintaining data confidentiality presents significant challenges for support teams due to the high level of regulation in this industry. Systems handling scheduling and bookings require strict adherence to privacy protocols. Even seemingly minor errors, like sending a flight confirmation to the wrong address, can result in serious breaches. Contact centers must implement meticulous measures to ensure data does not fall into the wrong hands.
There are three key areas that customer support leaders in the travel and hospitality industry should focus on to improve customer satisfaction and internal quality scores (IQS):
- Thorough onboarding and continuous coaching
- Fluid communication across support tiers
- A robust quality assurance program
If you’re running a support department, you likely have these elements in place. But are you following the best modern practices?
As our platform evolves and improves at a rapid pace, it is essential for our support teams to remain up-to-date with the product. Quality is also key in this aspect, as it enables us to quickly identify any knowledge gaps and address them through continuous team training and coaching.
Similarly, for our hoteliers’ knowledge and training, effective clients’ onboarding is crucial to prevent any misuse of the platform and potential revenue loss. Quality is also essential here; the onboarding sessions are carefully monitored to ensure that tailored content is consistently delivered to our hoteliers. This guarantees proper use of the tools and reduces the need for future support contacts.
Quality is no accident
Customer service quality assurance involves reviewing support interactions to enhance performance and boost customer satisfaction. While customer feedback is essential, it only provides part of the picture, as customers cannot evaluate agents based on internal quality standards.
This is why support teams use scorecards and review conversations against specific criteria to monitor Internal Quality Scores (IQS).
What is IQS?
Your Internal Quality Score (IQS) measures customer service performance against internal benchmarks. By reviewing conversations, you can calculate and track scores at the agent, team, and department levels. This metric serves as an ideal barometer for improving quality.
While smaller teams may tackle reviews and scores via spreadsheets, most larger and growing teams use dedicated quality management software to tackle QA.
Why is quality assurance important in the tourism industry?
Precision stands as a paramount aspect of customer service within the travel and hospitality sector. However, customers lack the means to assess the accuracy of information provided by agents. They may not grasp the intricacies of flight paths offered by systems like Galileo or Amadeus, but your agents should. Similarly, they may be unaware of package rates that travel agents can offer, which your agents are knowledgeable about.
Moreover, quality assurance plays a crucial role in ensuring compliance, protecting companies from regulatory penalties and substantial compensation payouts. Regularly reviewing support interactions in the travel industry allows leaders and coaches to gain insight into agent adherence.
Best practices for customer service quality assurance in the tourism industry
- Develop comprehensive and well-defined scorecards that align with company priorities.
Check out QA scorecard examples for inspiration. - Ensure that every agent, regardless of tier or location, comprehends the quality standards.
This is particularly crucial when outsourcing customer service; the distinction of whether the agent works directly for the company should not affect the customer’s experience. - Select the most relevant conversations to review.
Choosing at random is not going to provide the best interactions for learning purposes. Using a tool with smart filters, like Zendesk QA, can help you uncover hidden gems of information. Even better? Use a tool that automates conversation scores (AutoQA) to give your reviewers a very substantial head start. - Continuously track and review data to enhance quality.
This approach ensures that support quality remains resilient against factors like employee turnover, changes in products, and business growth.
Empower through coaching
The cornerstone of success—product knowledge, process awareness, empathy, grammar, and problem-solving—begins with onboarding and evolves through ongoing coaching.
Ensure precision in coaching by addressing the following:
1. Set clear goals
Align onboarding and coaching plans with customer feedback and internal quality standards. By setting and communicating priorities from day one, everyone works toward shared objectives, irrespective of location, tier, or team size. This approach also safeguards quality as your department expands.
2. Use data insights
Enhance onboarding and coaching sessions by leveraging support conversations to identify areas of excellence and improvement. Highlight instances where agents excel to inspire others and address shortcomings in personalized 1:1 sessions.
💫 Tools like AutoQA can identify impactful conversations and smart filters to pinpoint interactions with the most learning potential automatically.
3. Schedule coaching sessions
Adopt a blended approach to ensure coaching becomes ingrained in routine activities. How you deliver feedback is as crucial as the feedback itself. While personal feedback may be challenging, coaching positively impacts employee job satisfaction and engagement. Share effective feedback techniques with team leads to facilitate improvement.
4. Monitor progress and gather insights
Track quality metrics over time to identify patterns and trends, fostering continuous improvement. Displaying agents’ progress during coaching sessions reduces stress and enhances the rewarding nature of the process.
Zendesk QA (formerly Klaus) coaching sessions for targeted improvements
💫 Find out how Livestorm onboards and coaches new agents so that, no matter which continent or timezone their agents are in, everyone is in sync: Livestorm’s Success Story
Mastering communication
Effective customer service communication entails how your team interacts with customers and with each other. In the travel and hospitality sector, where teams span time zones and locations and customers demand rapid information, proficiency in both areas significantly enhances support quality.
Support channels: how you engage with customers
While chat support has gained traction in many industries, customers in the travel sector prefer email and phone communication. One common challenge companies face is when customers resort to social media to express their concerns, potentially leading to reputational damage.
How can you steer customers toward optimal communication channels?
The solution lies in clarity. Provide clear links to the appropriate email addresses and phone numbers for customers’ language and jurisdiction on all automated emails and web pages. Additionally, displaying expected response times and contact center hours adds further value.
Breaking the fourth wall for a minute
While researching this article, I went to the main pages of three global airlines to see how easy it was to get in touch with a customer service agent:
Airline 1
It took five clicks until I reached a page linked to messenger apps (no email or direct line numbers). This included going through a Knowledge Base, which gave no direct link to talk to a person.
Airline 2
Clicking on the customer service link on the main page leads to a field into which you type your problem. After I typed ‘I would like to speak to an agent, ‘ it offered several Knowledge Base articles, one of which led to an outdated Covid-19 information page. None of them provided direct contact with an agent – however, on each page were links to follow them on Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube 😑
Airline 3
Third time lucky! Within two clicks, I landed on a page that offered an email form, a list of in-person ticket desks, and a list of phone numbers for every country the airline operated in.
Avoiding internal siloes
Numerous entities in the travel and hospitality sector enlist Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) firms to manage support volumes, often necessitated by the requirement for multilingual assistance. Typically, this setup involves outsourcing tier-one agents while maintaining specialized in-house teams.
However, this layered approach can result in compartmentalized departments and delayed responses, leading to potential disparities in quality across teams, tiers, and locations.
Ensuring robust internal communication is just as crucial as external communication. The goal is not only to foster knowledge sharing but also to cultivate team unity, where everyone collaborates seamlessly.
💫 Find out how Glovo revolutionized their quality program to bring every agent onto the same page across BPOs and borders.
Improving support quality for the travel & hospitality sector
Accuracy and efficiency are paramount to customers in this sector. Challenges encompass inaccuracies, compensation administration, onboarding intricacies, and AI limitations regarding travel-related matters.
To elevate support quality, prioritize three key elements:
- Implement a robust quality assurance program (the pivotal role of QA in the travel industry cannot be emphasized enough)
- Facilitate effective onboarding and coaching
- Foster seamless communication with customers and internally.
