Q&A: At Travelocity, "Peopleocity" Helps Drive Customer Satisfaction

Since its founding in 1996, Travelocity.com has grown from just 10 employees into a global company with more than 2000 agents. On May 17, 2013, John Billings, who has responsibility for Travelocity.com’s North American contact center operations, will host the Call Center Training Day at his organization's award-winning San Antonio facility.

Billings recently joined Call Center IQ's Shawn Siegel to discuss his organization's contact center strategies.

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Call Centert IQ: What are some of the unique challenges of customer service in the travel sector? Do you think other sectors are easier to manage?

John Billings: Travel is very dynamic, and components of the overall experience are delivered by a broad and diverse group of providers including airlines, hotels, car rental companies, and local tour operators. There are also thousands of destinations to choose from. Each travel component and destination offers unique features and benefits, and in order to win the sale, our agents must be able to effectively identify and understand a customer’s needs and preferences, find the right trip to match those needs, make a recommendation to the customer, overcome objections, and close the sale. They do that every single day with nearly 400 airlines, 140,000 hotels, several different rental car companies, and an endless list of destinations and tours.

Once the sale is made, weather and other acts of nature can disrupt the trip and have a significant impact on the ability of all service providers to deliver their piece of the trip in a timely and enjoyable fashion. Snowstorms, hurricanes, airline schedule changes, the condition of a hotel room, or the safety and security of local tours are just a few examples of unforeseen events that can impact a consumer’s overall experience and satisfaction with the trip. Travelocity offers the Travelocity Guarantee, which states that if something isn’t right on your trip and you inform us immediately, we’ll work with our partners to make it right, right away – but our agents must be prepared to deliver on that Guarantee.

As a result, agent training must be very extensive, the systems and tools used by agents must be very information-rich and easy to update on the fly, and the operation must be ready quickly mobilize and flex up to answer calls during an unplanned travel disruption. A process must be in place to quickly obtain travel policy information from impacted travel suppliers, and load it onto the agent desktop to ensure that our customer service agents have relevant and timely information at their fingertips so that they can communicate to our customers knowledgably and effectively. And where possible, Travelocity must be able to proactively communicate with customers to minimize the impact of the travel disruption. The goal, after all, is to do everything possible to get a customer’s trip back on track. In other words, for being an "online" travel agency, the offline component of the business is surprisingly robust and complex!

CCIQ: How do you go about quantifying the effects that customer experience has on the bottom line?

Billings: Traditionally we’ve viewed CSAT as a measure of the effectiveness of service, but we recently commissioned a data-driven analytics study that helped measure the business value of a better customer experience. We looked at CSAT surveys over a one-year period, then captured and measured bookings over the following one-year period to provide insight into the correlation between CSAT and repeat purchase behavior. We’re also looking at the purchase habits of customers who were provided Future Trip Discounts (FTD), discount codes that can be used to compensate customers for a poor customer experience. By understanding the purchase habits of customers who were issued FTDs, we can make smarter decisions about where and how we invest in the overall customer experience, and revise components of the Travelocity Guarantee, which is our underlying customer service philosophy and guidelines that agents use when interacting with customers.

CCIQ: The San Antonio contact center has won numerous awards, particularly for its workplace environment. What aspects of the facility and operations make it worthy of these honors?

Billings: We have an engaged leadership team, and when combined with "Peopleocity" efforts, it makes an environment where people want to be. Peopleocity is a team of Travelocity employees, from many departments, that work to serve as a resource for Travelocity employees. The Peopleocity Team’s mission is to respond to employee feedback with the goal of creating a more engaged and satisfying workplace for all employees.

The operation has a flexible attendance policy, which supports work/life balance and the rewards and recognition program constantly receives positive feedback. Lastly, there’s an employee development program in place that fosters career pathing and encourages growth and promotion from within recognition programs.

CCIQ: Can you discuss Travelocity’s new "Peopleocity" program and what it aims to accomplish?

John Billings: Our ‘Peopleocity’ team works closely with our supervisors and the leadership team to create a fun, engaging and high performing atmosphere – where the slogan is ‘The Force Behind Travelocity’. From organizing staff picnics to setting up career development stations and creating a channel where we can all share ideas, this team has driven overall employee satisfaction to new heights.

CCIQ: Call centers can be overwhelmed with internal data. How do you wade through this data to come up with actionable ideas?

John Billings: We have clear objectives from our leadership to build the "best team in travel," and to achieve that goal we use a number of key performance indicators to measure, assess, and identify opportunities to improve the overall customer experience and efficiency of the operation. Customer and employee satisfaction are two key indicators, under the assumption that engaged and happy employees yield satisfied customers.