Share this Post
The client was facing increasing difficulties in coping with the rising volume of customer queries. IGT helped the client to rapidly resolve tickets related to pre/post bookings, stay queries, complaints, and inquiries across multiple channels while rationalizing operational expenses simultaneously.
Share this Post
About the Client
The client is an apex player in the global hospitality space, maintaining an extensive chain of hotels, homes and living spaces worldwide. The inventory portfolio is elaborate, incorporating investments in entirely operated real estate. It includes more than 20,000 hotels across continents, offering over 1 million rooms. Further, the company also promises comfortable lodging for business and leisure travelers in over 1,30,000 properties globally through its Vacation Homes service line. At present, the client maintains its operational footprint in over 800 cities in more than 80 countries.
Business Challenge
For an entity with a strong presence across the global hospitality supply chain, a substantial share of the client’s revenue is realized through its online booking platform. It delivers single window access to prospective service consumers looking for information on franchise hotels. However, due to the absence of an efficient and responsive customer care culture, the company was facing increasing difficulties in coping with the rising volume of customer queries. To stay relevant and profitable, it was imperative for the client to rapidly resolve tickets related to pre/post bookings, stay queries, complaints, and inquiries across multiple channels while rationalizing operational expenses simultaneously.
Business Need
As a business process transformation leader in the Leisure & Hospitality domain, IGT thoroughly assessed the client's strategic priorities. It realized that the business needs robust, scalable and affordable customer care interventions along with the suitable shoring options that should be able to deliver:
Skilled human capital: A team of experts equipped to orchestrate and resolve customer queries voice, chat, and emails, backed by knowledge leadership and domain experience in the hospitality sector.
Fast resolution: Due to persisting operational gaps, the client faced a progressive surge in the aging incidents. The trend ran the risk of compromising the service experience, impacting customer satisfaction. The mission was to control pendency within budget while enriching customer experience in the process.
Stringent monitoring & reporting: Establish an intuitive monitoring and reporting framework that can deliver end-to-end visibility and continuously assess and verify optimum SLA adherence.
Uncompromised quality: Drive a high degree of standardization and incubate a customer-first culture focused on improving the soft skills of the workforce, inspiring customer delight.
Solution
IGT leveraged its deep business insights and domain excellence in the Leisure & Hospitality vertical, architecting a customized solution to address the client’s unique needs. It deployed a team of product consultants and process engineers at its delivery location in Gurgaon, India, to steer the following interventions:
Post Sales Help Desk: IGT set up an Inbound Voice and Chat team to predict the after-sales query count and deliver the first-call resolution to 80% of the customers.
Escalation Desk: IGT established a mechanism to coordinate with local hospitality partners to inspect and validate the concern raised by the guests over services and other amenities. The goal is to preempt suboptimal service delivery and improve customer satisfaction in future transactions.
Cancellation: The IGT team handles the booking cancellation requests received from the Guest/OTA. The team manages the tickets as per the client’s cancellation policy.
Shifting: The IGT team addresses any voluntary/in-voluntary room/property moving requests from the guests based on the set guidelines.
Monitoring & Customer Feedback Management: The IGT team maintains the workflow to reach out proactively to the guest in-stay, collect feedback on hotel services, and address miscellaneous stay-related queries.
Benefits
- 40% reduction in operational overheads
- 90% backlogs across various escalations addressed within merely three months
- Enhanced service offering and improved customer delight
- 100% SLA adherence monthly
- Supported the client with ad hoc special projects within existing headcount
- Optimized workforce utilization with a team of experts capable of taking over new tasks with minimum investment in time and training
Tools & Technologies
C-Zentrix, Haptik, Freshdesk