Modernized contact center paves the future for BIDTravel

BIDTravel offers customized travel services that cover everything from individual vacations to corporate travel contracts. They believe that a vacation is only truly restful when everything goes smoothly, while traveling for business should not make you miss home too much. This takes coordination, strong relationships with service providers and a personal touch.

BIDTravel operates nine different legal entities, across differentiated brands. Not all brands had access to a contact center platform and those that did were running a diverse set of on-premises solutions, each requiring significant expertise. This was not only costly but also presented challenges when trying to identify maintenance windows for downtime.

Voice quality was an ongoing issue. To ensure that customers could reach them, some employees gave out their personal numbers, resulting in calls outside of office hours. This inability to disconnect resulted in some agents suffering from burnout.

Email posed another challenge with each brand using their own email platform.

To continue delivering the best possible service to their customers, BIDTravel wanted to overhaul their contact center operating systems. They needed a platform that could manage resources better, based on geographic location, and ensure high-quality voice calls and consistent engagement across brands and communication channels.

Delivering a great customer experience with personalized service is part of what makes BIDTravel unique. To better understand BIDTravel’s business aspirations, customer success measures and priorities, we started our engagement by speaking with employees across the organization.

We ran a series of empathy interviews with senior management, supervisors and agents, as well as HR and accounts teams. This helped us to understand their frustrations, piece together the full customer journey and associated processes, and identify what was hampering service delivery.

With a comprehensive view of the business, including the technology, culture and overall value proposition, we built a roadmap for the senior management team that served as a blueprint for their vision.

To enable BIDTravel to realize this vision, we recommended the Genesys Cloud CX platform alongside our Managed Customer Experience (MCX) service. This would allow the business to manage the customer experience from a single platform, regardless of the channel. With this solution, customer enquiries could be allocated to the relevant brand. The team could then track and manage agent performance against the appropriate service level agreements.

To ensure the system operates optimally, continuous testing was essential. We leveraged our Cloud Voice for CX service and added a unique proactive monitoring component called synthetic testing. This involved simulating voice calls to ensure that the call got through, then to test the quality of the call, check the time taken to process it on the system, and confirm that the customer received the correct message.

To address the problem of voice quality on calls, we set up the system to recognize when the voice quality was poor, automatically raising a ticket and alerting the IT team so they could quickly resolve the issue.

An intuitive user experience makes the system easy for employees to use. It also reduces the time taken for agents to respond, improving the speed of service. The new system also means there’s greater process consistency across all the business units and brands. 

There has been a marked improvement in the stability of the system, with Genesys and Managed CX working seamlessly to deliver a continually reliable service. 

Improvements in call quality and the ability to quickly route the call to the right agent have helped restore employees’ work–life balance. This has resulted in higher levels of employee satisfaction and overall wellbeing. It’s also allowed employees to work remotely while still providing BIDTravel with full visibility and central supervision. “When we encountered issues with the email channel, the NTT DATA team stepped up to the plate and found a solution. It’s times like this when having the right partner makes all the difference,” says Herby Seedat, BIDTravel CIO. 

The Genesys platform is continuing to develop, with new features and functions being added that will continue to benefit BIDTravel into the future. For example, we found that 80% of BIDTravel’s customer engagements were taking place over email and 20% over the phone, so we helped them respond by moving the business to voice, email and WhatsApp after the project had run its course. 

BIDTravel can now generate reports on demand, which means that the individual brands can monitor and act on any issues across all their channels.