Omni-Channel Customer Engagement Article

It’s often said that customer expectations are high today, and this is true. It still matters, however, what sort of product or service an organization is delivering. A customer will be more forgiving of an error in a transaction for a book or DVD than they will for an item with a high ticket prices, such as an appliance or a car. Airline customers are especially demanding: not only are they putting their safety and comfort into the hands of a service provider, but it’s nearly impossible to walk away from that service if expectations of quality support aren’t delivered. In addition, new customers aren’t easy to attract, and lost customers represent significant lost business.

For these reasons, airlines and travel agencies need to be vigilant about offering the highest quality of truly omnichannel customer support. These customers tend to be highly mobile, tech-savvy and just as likely to communicate via mobile methods as land lines or desktop-based Web sites. They expect fast and accurate service, the ability to change communications channels “on the fly” and the option to escalate to a manager if the conversation with an agent is unfolding to their liking.

The SNTTA travel agency, which operates three contact centers across the United Arab Emirates (UAE) recently began searching for a solution to underpin its multimedia contact center to deliver better service and handle the fast-paced growth of its operations while at the same time improving efficiency. The SNTTA contact center needs to be able to handle multichannel customer interactions by telephone, email and Web. Business operations within the contact center include reservations, update on special travel offers, online payments and registrations for customized private events, excursions and desert safari programs.

Ultimately, the company turned to Altitude’s uCI 8 contact center solution, which provided the travel management company a suite of advanced contact center features, including unified agent desktops, voice portals, as well as centralized monitoring, queuing, routing and reporting solutions that were designed to optimize service and increase productivity in the contact centers. The company also needed a solution that would expand with it in plans to open new offices and new corporate accounts.

"With the new system, we have managed to increase first call resolution, create consistency in our incoming call management and make our contact center operations far more effective," said K. Valsa Kumar, Group General Manager - Finance & Admin for SNTTA.

Kumar said the company chose the Altitude solution because it found it to be both full-featured and cost-effective.

“In addition to providing a single suite of integrated contact center capabilities, Altitude also provides a local support presence across the entire United Arab Emirates, from Sharjah to Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Jebel Ali. These points made Altitude a clear winner as it matches with our plans to expand our contact center to other departments within the SNTTA group," Kumar said.

After implementation of uCI 8, the quality of service at SNTTA improved significantly, with more than 94 percent first-call resolution rates. (First-call resolution means customers questions, problems or concerns are addressed completely with a single contact with a company.) In addition, the average speed of answer has shortened from 20 seconds to eight seconds since the beginning of 2015.