The impact of covid on businesses around the world has largely been degrading, with many forced to shut shop.
But no one has felt this impact more than the travel and hospitality industry.
As the pandemic raged across countries, governments introduced strict lockdowns. This meant that for a larger part of two years, smooth travel was not possible.
Airlines, hotels, and restaurants that used to flourish due to the tourist influx suddenly found no takers for their services. The whammy was also severe because it came suddenly and unannounced.
There was no way to deploy any contingencies!!
Two years later, the travel and hospitality industry is slowly getting back on its feet but the jitters can still be felt.
It’s understood as the industry has just gotten out of a testing phase. But it is also the right opportunity for businesses to relook at their service and target better customer experience at each point.
The tools required for this need to be more efficient than ever. And this is where call center management can help you rise above your competitors.
Exactly how would be something we’d discuss in today’s article. We’d also talk about-
- Challenges in the Hospitality Industry Call Center Management Must Solve
- How Call Center Management Can Help Tourism Businesses
- Managing Call Center Management
Challenges in the Hospitality Industry Call Center Management Must Solve
As per a report, hotels can see a drop of up to 20% in per room revenue by 2023.
The pandemic has indeed changed the entire scenario, and the industry leaders have to think about a lot of variables. These are the foremost challenges that the hospitality and tourism industry is currently facing-
- 4Ws and 1H
For the unaware, 4W and 1H mean what, why, where, when and how.
These five phrases are running through the minds of industry leaders. There are some places where tourists have started coming back. On the other hand, there still remain countries where strict lockdowns have become a regular occurrence.
As covid continues to play hide and seek and a new wave emerging every quarter, it’s tough to be sure of the ‘perfect time’ to resume business as usual.
- Not Enough Vacancy
Understanding the pandemic from the tourist’s point of view, we’ll notice that the morale to travel has been down even after the removal of restrictions.
The hesitancy to travel is still very much there and as a result booking percentage has not seen a significant jump.
The hotel expenses are the same and managing these with fewer customers is quite tricky.
- Less Staff
It was not just the industry that suffered overall, the impact of the pandemic was mainly shouldered by staff employed in hotels, airlines and restaurants.
Now that the industry is trying to get back on its feet, it’s finding that CXM improvement is impossible without capable employees.
This reduction in the workforce is one of the primary reasons holding back the progress of the hospitality industry.
How Can Call Center Management Help Tourism Businesses?
- Getting to Know Customer Expectations
Customer expectations have really taken a 180-degree turn since the onset of the pandemic.
So the travel industry needs to reach customers with their service without waiting for them to reach out. For this purpose, a workforce management call center can be pretty instrumental.
A modern-day call center utilizes AI and machine learning based platforms to analyze customer behavior and provide you with deep, actionable insights.
- Sales Campaigns
Just gauging customer expectations is not enough, sometimes you have to spearhead these expectations.
And a good call center workforce management solution helps you stay two steps ahead of your competitors and surpass all expectations.
For example, sales campaigns can be developed that inform your customers about all the features and facilities your hotel/restaurant/airline offers.
You can also apprise the customer about your dedication towards their safety and health.
As a cherry on top, a call center management solution can be used to analyze the customer behavior and the agent’s performance can be tracked.
- Omnichannel Presence
Gone are the days when the customer reached out to a business through a call. In today’s time, there are multiple channels through which a potential customer can interact with your organization.
If you deploy a call center management system, you can ensure the same quality of service across all communication channels and thus provide a consistent customer experience.
A crucial part of call center management best practices is the option of talking to customers in the language of their choice. Hence you can even attract customers from different parts of the world.
- Revolutionizing Business Process Through Technology
The introduction of AI and machine learning has led to the automation of recurring tasks so that call center reps can better service their customers.
Many call center performance management tools use chatbots that can easily cater to frequently asked customer queries.
Such an innovation becomes all the more important in times when customers don’t want to wait for long to obtain answers to their grievances.
In the case of hotels and restaurants, chatbots can tell customers about availability and even confirm their bookings. This way, agents can focus on providing a unique experience to customers with more extensive queries.
Managing Call Center Management
While the hospitality and travel industry are still testing the waters post covid, they need not worry about tending to changing customer expectations.
They can seek the services of a contact center with an expert staff trained to handle all sorts of customers.
But what they do need to think about is devising specific criteria and outsourcing to only that contact center that ticks off every point. We’d show you a checklist to get you started -
- Whether the contact center is Scalable?
It’s anybody’s guess that these post-pandemic jitters will not last a lifetime. Sooner or later, they’d be over and you’d need to cater to the pre-covid rush.
For the sake of the foreseeable future, you need to pair up with a call center that can scale up along with your business in the busy season. It should also be able to scale down without hassle during the non-rush months.
- Cost Saving
As this is a time for heralding operational changes, cost saving has become the go-to word for the hospitality and tourism industry.
And this is precisely what a call center management firm should do for you. Cut down on operational expenditure while, at the same time, acting as your frontier for customers and providing them with exceptional service.
- Customer Experience
In today’s time, customers are paying increasing attention to the kind of experience they get from your business.
But you know that companies are yet to wake up to this fact when more than 50% of the customers say that customer experience at most firms needs improvement.
The core reason people go on a trip is to have a ‘good experience’. So you have to go with a contact center that has solid plans in place to elevate the customer experience with each interaction.
A sure-shot way of ensuring a great customer experience is for call centers to train and coach their agents regularly.
Convin is one such platform that is made for the betterment of your agents. Record all inbound and outbound calls and analyze each of them for particular phrases or words.
On the basis of this analysis, you can rank your agents and then put them up for coaching. Sign up here for complete information about all our exciting features.
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