How To Handle Peak Season In The Travel Industry
The blog post emphasizes that travel companies can better manage peak booking seasons by creating a flexible pool of trained customer service agents, allowing for easy scaling of staff as demand fluctuates. This agile approach enhances operational efficiency and fosters customer loyalty by prioritizing great service.
Some industries have well defined peak seasons. Retail is facing one right now with Black Friday and the end of year holidays all coming soon. The peak for travel bookings will come in Q1 as Europeans and Americans sit at home in winter dreaming of when they can take a summer vacation.
So travel has different types of peak season. There is a peak in actual travel activity when the weather warms up in summer, but the peak for bookings is in the winter - as customers plan ahead.
How can travel companies handle these peaks? The customer service process needs to be flexible enough to handle the peak season and then to reduce focus as the demand slows down.
Traditional customer service providers don’t have many answers. They will attempt to predict demand by forecasting, they will create some queue management strategies, and they will bring temporary customer service agents on board.
However, none of this really addresses the fundamental issue that the customer service team needs to be very flexible and needs the ability to scale up and down as the peak season arrives and then passes.
Yoummday takes a very different approach.
We create a bench of talents - the talented customer service agents. Ensure that you have more people on the team than you need, even for the busiest peak period. This often requires just minimal onboarding because we can often find people from our existing pool of talents who have very similar experience and knowledge - many have worked for years in the travel industry.
Then forecast your demand and invite the agents to work during the hours that you need covered. If demand is suddenly increasing on a day when it was not expected then you can send a text to all the trained agents asking if they want to work a few hours on that day.
When the peak period passes you can just reduce the number of hours that is available to the team. It is a much more flexible way of designing a customer care strategy compared to a traditional contact center environment.
The talents enjoy more flexibility. They can choose when to work and can even arrange multiple short shifts in a single day to fit around other commitments. The travel company is also happy. They don’t need to follow any of that outdated advice about filling a contact center with temporary workers and then firing them all once the demand starts declining.
Just imagine training people and then firing them because you only need them for 12 weeks each year?
Travel companies that look after their customers see those customers returning year after year. This is the importance of great service in the travel industry - it quickly creates loyalty.
In the twenty-first century it is now possible to build an agile customer service team that can flex and change for peak periods of activity. Don’t accept anything less for your customers.
