Travel customer experience and leisure can never go out of fashion. Do you agree that an industry that is based on the basic human need to relax and escape from the humdrum of life is actually responsible for creating millions of jobs and revenues? It’s no secret that with increasing internet and mobile penetration, travel and hospitality industry was evidently one of the first to board the digital transformation wagon. And today, from booking tickets for traveling to finding a home-stay anywhere around the globe can be done with a click of a button in seconds.
A recent Google and Phocuswright report titled how smartphones influence the entire travel journey in the U.S. and abroad, shows 48% of smartphone users in U.S. and 45% in the U.K. are comfortable researching, booking, and planning their entire trip to a new travel destination using only a mobile device. Growing disposable incomes, expanding customer base and changing travel patterns are all interconnected and key contributors in changing customer expectations of this sector. The need for personalization and quicker resolutions along with increasing disruptive competition like Uber and AriBnB is making it necessary for companies to blend technology with insights for offering seamless CX.
On the other hand, tech-savvy and always on-the-go millennials are using travel customer experience and hospitality services in completely new and unexpected ways, creating multiple windows for brands to attract them, given the company’s readiness to be disrupted. In 2017, Gartner reported that 7% of top-performing companies rank Artificial Intelligence as a game-changing technology and by 2018, that figure had catapulted to 40%. Speaking of emerging technologies and trends, IoT, Automation, AI, Machine Learning, Analytics, Integrated CX, and Service Personalization top the charts for 2019. Travel companies across the globe have been utilizing the latest customer trends and technologies to reduce costs, personalize customer experience and up-scale both, employee performance and CX.
As a leading service provider for this sector, we have seen that utilizing travel and hospitality CX best practices and reducing redundant tasks and processes can help achieve the digital readiness quickly for brands and help them succeed in the digital times. Recently, we helped reduce retail losses for a travel enterprise by 75% and AHT by 30% with an in-house AI based automated fare calculating tool iFare™. In another instance, one of our proprietary automation-based platforms iLoad™ using Natural Language Processing for automatic data entry, recently helped a global travel and hospitality conglomerate achieve 90% reduction in manual errors and upto 23% reduction in contract support operational costs. iLoad™ was also recently recognized with the TMC & Customer Magazine CRM Excellence Award for its productivity enhancing capabilities in the travel and hospitality industry.
Working with some of the global leaders and trendsetters in this sector, Teleperformance in India has a team of over 7,000+ passionate travel and hospitality experts. This team is front-ending customer interactions and digitizing the customer experience at the back-end with latest RPA, AI based solutions aligned to the changing customer needs. With strong industry experience and a global investment in AI, IoT, Prescriptive Analysis, and other tech travel trends and technologies, our service delivery for this vertical is unparalleled.
If your brand is looking for similar benefits to create exceptional travel experiences for your customers, click here to get in touch.
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Contributor: Neha Sethi @nehacsethi