CX Automation in Travel Booking: Upgrade Your Experience

As the temps are rising and the days are getting longer in the Northern Hemisphere, people are getting itchy for their next vacation. It’s time for travel agencies to set a course to meet or exceed the expectations of those who have been bitten by the travel bug.

No matter if someone is planning a quick weekend getaway, THE family trip of the year, or a once-in-a-lifetime adventure tour, one thing is certain: everyone wants an easy and convenient booking experience.

While the expertise of a travel advisor is key to creating an exceptional experience, today’s consumers expect a seamless customer experience (CX). This includes unifying their interactions across both your digital and in-person channels, helping to ensure connections are made between each stop on their CX journey. This is made possible with CX Automation solutions that help companies:

• Reduce customer wait times
• Increase sales and fuel business growth
• Improve productivity and boost employee performance.

Let’s journey with two major travel companies to learn how they enhanced their vacation service offerings with Verint.

Improving CX with Digital Appointment Booking and Virtual Waitlists

Offering vacation holidays to all four corners of the world is not smooth sailing, even for industry leaders. Although the cost of travel continues to climb, the sector has grown significantly in the past few years.

In 2024, international travel trips are expected to exceed pre-pandemic levels, with about 1.53 billion tourists following their wanderlust. As a comparison, last year approx. 975 million people traveled the world (from January to September).¹ As more people are planning to take more trips, travel agencies must keep up with the demand.

People who book their vacation holidays through travel advisors usually start with a vacation consultation. But often, if they don’t book an appointment in advance, they can easily find themselves at the end of a long line, especially during peak periods.

It feels like an unnecessarily long layover, instead of an epic start to a vacation holiday. Tourists who use travel agencies to realize their vacation dreams do so to cut through the hassle of travel planning, not add more to it.

Eliminating Long Lines and Walkouts

A leading travel and tourism company decided to get rid of the physical lines at their store fronts, which were being managed with clipboards, paper and pens. Instead, they sought a more efficient way of tracking customers waiting for service.

To provide a calm, informed waiting experience for walk-ins, they introduced Verint Queue Management. Using the solution, they now seamlessly add customers to virtual waitlists, keeping them informed by sending real-time notifications about the actual wait time and their position in the queue.

By removing the physical lines, the customers’ perception of wait time lessened significantly. As a result, the travel company was able to reduce wait times by 57% and reduce walkouts by 65%!

Creating Convenience with Digital Appointment Booking

Vacation holidays are high-cost purchases, which means that customers may want to compare and weigh options before purchasing. Many will start their research online, and then make an appointment with an advisor. But calling and waiting on hold to schedule an appointment once they were ready to talk was not a great experience.

The travel company implemented Verint Appointment Booking to create a more seamless customer experience across digital and in-person channels. This also made it easy for customers to book a return visit with the same advisor if they were unable to complete their vacation purchase during their first visit.

The company saw a 48% increase in conversions (booked travel) for those customers who booked appointments through the Verint Appointment Booking application on their website.

Equipped with these solutions, the travel agency not only reduced in-store wait times and walkouts, but it also improved store associate productivity and increased sales.

The solutions were their passport to success.

Read more about how they benefit from using Verint retail solutions here.

Cruising Toward a Seamless Customer Journey with Workforce Management

Customers have high expectations for service. They want answers to their questions anytime, anywhere—immediately. If a brand is not fast to respond with the right answers, customers will quickly find another that is.

In our digitally savvy world, where competition is just a click away, companies cannot afford to offer less than exceptional service for their customers. Being responsive and accurate requires knowledgeable customer support agents who are available when the customer needs them.

Hurtigruten, a leading adventure travel group, offers unique small-ship and land-based adventures. These are special, luxury travel experiences, often booked by customers for special occasions or as bucket list trips. Customers are excited and want to know every single detail.

Whatever the question, Hurtigruten aims to offer their customers expert support, guidance, and advice not only through local travel agents, but also by phone or the web.

But without the right CX Automation solutions, offering exceptional omnichannel service is difficult. For Hurtigruten, the challenge was to always have the right number of agents to meet the changing customer needs. Their former staff scheduling solution provided limited flexibility and functionality, had mostly manual reporting, and was on-premises—increasing costs and complexity.

Hurtigruten chose Verint Workforce Management to help them deliver a seamless customer journey across diverse channels. Part of Verint Open Platform, Hurtigruten was able to deploy the cloud-based solution extremely quickly.

The adventure travel group managed to increase productivity, boost employee performance, and help fuel business growth. Specifically, Hurtigruten:

• Achieved a 30% improvement in ASA (average speed of answer), a key service metric
• Increased productivity of the workforce planning team by 35%
• Transformed agent coaching and training.

Read more about how Hurtigruten uses Verint Workforce Management here.

Build Your CX Automation Itinerary with Verint

The travel industry can upgrade its CX automation to deliver first-class service while managing costs and resources. Many travel companies are deploying Verint CX Automation solutions, including:

• Appointment Booking and Queue Management
• Enterprise Workforce Management
• Voice of the Customer
• Channel Automation

If you’d like to find out how to retain customers through hybrid engagement strategies coupled with modern working practices, read our recent research report here.

And to learn more about Verint customer engagement solutions for retailers, click here.

¹ Global Tourism Statistics 2024: Facts and Forecasts, by Yam Bahadur Chhetri, WP Travel.