Travel Needs A Flexible CX Solution To Handle The Peak Season

We are now in the middle of the peak summer travel season. This means that many companies in the European travel sector will be expecting their busiest months right now. Customer enquiries will be increased at hotels, airlines, and every other business that sees a peak in the middle of the year.

Naturally this means that many of them will be ramping up their customer service team with some temporary resource. This is a natural response to the peak season, but it is always a challenge in a traditional contact center or business process outsourcing (BPO) environment.

Take a look at this article from the software company Zendesk. They are emphasizing that it is very hard to find people to work in customer service right now. It is even harder to retain people and it is a terrible strain on the human resources team when managers want to temporarily increase their team and then let people go after the summer.

Effective workforce management is one part of the answer. If you can accurately predict how many people you need on each week, or even each day, then you can at least start to prepare for the busiest period of the year.

Supporting your workforce with artificial intelligence (AI) is also essential. AI can remove many of the repetitive and mundane administration tasks that customer service teams need to perform. It can also offer realtime analysis into how customers are responding to interactions - so it can offer realtime coaching across the entire team, based on real interactions.

But a traditional contact center will always have specific challenges with the flexibility that is needed. You can only expand to fill the spare capacity that is available in the office. You can only expand if you can find new people to hire living near to your contact center. You may need to pay temporary workers more than the full-time team and this creates resentment with the people who work there all year long.

It’s a minefield of problems. Typical advice to customer service managers is to cancel all vacations and increase overtime so all the team is available for more hours. However, this can just cause more issues because it means that none of your own team are allowed to enjoy a summer break and they find that their entire summer is spent working 12-hour shifts at the contact center - people will be leaving for alternative jobs very quickly.

This is why the yoummday platform-based approach works so well for industries like travel. A travel company can maintain an internal core team that is there all year, but then use yoummday to augment the team anytime that a busy period is expected.

There is no need to worry about office space as all the talents are based at home. You can locate and hire them from anywhere so specific requirements like language skills are easy to find. Many of them have previous experience in travel so the onboarding process is extremely fast.

In addition, the model is entirely flexible. You can ramp up or ramp down as needed. The talent is available when needed and as autumn approaches, you can turn it off and revert back to your core team.

It’s not too late to use yoummday for your customer service requirements this summer. With our rapid onboarding process, talents can be ready to help you extremely quickly. So if you are now struggling with mandatory overtime and a ban on vacations then why not consider an alternative that is better for your own employees and better for your customers?