The Travel Industry Needs A Flexible Solution For Customer Experience
In this blog post, we explore how the travel industry, facing staffing shortages and heightened demand, can overcome customer service challenges through the yoummday platform.
The travel industry has had a rough time over the past few years. The Covid pandemic created a situation where many people could not travel at all for most of 2020 and 2021. Then 2022 rebounded, with people determined to make up for lost time, but the customer service situation was a disaster.
Staffing was a major issue across the travel sector. Flight cancellations hit new records and there were major problems across the entire sector. Over 62 million travel-focused jobs were lost in 2020 and in October 2021 Deloitte reported that the number of people working in hotels was 300,000 down on 2019.
Although the pandemic was in the rear view mirror, many travel companies struggled to find staff so they could ramp up again to meet demand. Some people left the industry because of the pandemic and they have not returned. Some retired. Early retirement has led to a shortage of pilots at many airlines.
The issue for the travel industry is that demand is now exceeding 2019 levels and yet staffing levels have not returned. Customers want to travel. They are ready to book travel, but they don’t want endless cancellations and disruption.
What can the travel companies do?
Think again about how they hire. Many travel companies insist on hiring fully qualified travel agents to staff their customer service helpline. This does mean that the customer is handled by highly knowledgable agents, but it makes it very hard to flexibly scale up. In many cases these qualifications can take several years to achieve.
Yoummday offers an alternative approach to hiring customer service agents to work inside an internal contact center. We have thousands of experienced and qualified individuals on our platform already - including people with many years of experience in the travel industry.
Our clients use the platform to indicate when they need people and how many. The talents (our term for agents) are informed that shifts are available and they sign up - choosing their own flexible hours.
That’s all that is required. The entire process can be managed inside the client business, often by a single manager. You don’t need any expensive equipment or training to manage the process. It’s extremely simple - the opposite of how outsourcing is often represented.
This process can even run alongside your internal team. You can work with our team to augment your existing team. Use your own team as the core of your customer service operation and work with our team to give them a boost during busy periods or to cover shifts that an unpopular within the office.
This is a key strength of the yoummday platform. You don’t need to design a new strategy. You don’t need to spend months negotiating an outsourcing contract with a new supplier. It’s almost like turning on a tap that is filled with talent.
Turn on the supply when needed and off when the business is quieter and can rely only on the core team. You decide. The platform is entirely flexible and can help travel companies to cope with the rush to book for summer 2024.
