Managing requests in a travel agency (OTA)

Processing requests from passengers at a travel agency is a very important and sensitive process for business. Poor quality of service ultimately affects customer loyalty, churn and opinion of the company in the travel agency market.

Everything that will be written below is an absolutely real project that was implemented by me in an online travel agency. Given that a sufficient number of years have passed, the description can be shared with a wide audience. Here I will not go into a description of the technical details of the solution, because… it is not so important.

Situation at the start

And so, we have a successful Online Travel Agency, one of the TOP 5 players in the Russian market for the sale of airline tickets. Sales include tens of thousands of tickets from various airlines, which are issued in various booking systems, both Russian and Western. According to industry statistics at that time, the share of returns and exchanges is about 5-8% of sales. There is a call center that processes incoming requests from customers for returns, exchanges, questions and complaints. Operators have different qualifications in terms of knowledge of reservation systems, ranging from “know 1-2” to very qualified, knowing 5-7 systems.

The problem was formulated as follows:

• a long time for a request to remain in the queue without processing

• long time to resolve customer requests

• as a consequence of the first two points:

  • increase in complaints – negativity from passengers, angry publications on social networks

  • growth of the request queue

Appeals lived their own lives in a system that made it possible to manually indicate the importance of the appeal and, for convenience, “painted” them in different colors. This palette was sorted out by operators, choosing requests for processing.

Dive into the problem

Diving into the problem showed that there were many requests in the queue that were difficult from the point of view of processing and at the same time urgent from the point of view of the passenger. At some point in time, such calls had to be literally “extinguished” on an emergency basis by sending operators to them.

Such distraction to firefighting tasks became the reason for the formation of a new flow of “burning” requests. Those. it was a real snowball that was rolling down the mountain, not yet at breakneck speed, but already picking up speed.

Having dug a couple more deeper, it became clear that the main problem was that the operators themselves chose their own requests for processing. And like any person who wants to minimize their labor costs on routine operations, the operators chose not the priority tasks to complete, but the easiest ones. Of course, with manual control from the shift supervisor or the call center manager, the necessary requests were sent to work. But this was not a process, but rather manual control.

Solution

The solution to the problem was twofold:

1. Basics. Move from the work format “the operator selects a request for processing” to “the system issues a request for processing”

2. Classify all requests and introduce a fairly strict processing scheme for them to manage intermediate states

3. To create a new solution for call center operators and a passenger’s personal account, which was to become the starting point for interaction with the company.

The issuance of requests (the operator actually pressed the “Get request” button) was based on a general queue, which consisted of requests sorted by weight. Such indicators as type of treatment, time before departure, importance, etc. took part in the calculation of weight.

When issuing a request for processing, the system took into account the operator’s profile, his knowledge of reservation systems, and the ability to process certain types of requests.

Of course, the opportunity was provided to refuse to complete the request, but in this case the operator was obliged to indicate the reason for the refusal and this information was subsequently included in the reports. The request was returned to the queue and returned to processing. This ensured that the currently important request would be processed.

To classify requests and formulate a processing process, process diagrams were developed together with a leading aviation technologist. They contained complete information from the creation of a request to its execution, indicating the actions of both the operator and the client.

These schemes formed the basis of our system and made it possible to implement a controlled, controlled process for processing requests.

The implementation of such a solution gradually relieved the call center’s telephone channel, because interaction with clients was transferred to the format of creating a request from the passenger’s personal account.

As an interim result we received:

1. Managed queue of passenger requests, which was ranked taking into account business metrics

2. Significant (by several times) reduction in the queue of requests being processed

3. Ability to fine-tune the request processing process

4. Possibility of obtaining digitized performance indicators of the call center (processing time for requests by category, reservation systems, operators, etc.)

Development

A logical continuation of the development of this system was proactive work with clients.

Information from airlines related to schedule changes and flight delays was processed and on its basis a request was created, but on behalf of the call center in the direction of the passenger.

This approach made it possible to solve the problems of exchange and return in advance, without bringing the situation to an urgent call to the call center. On the other hand, this fit into the ideology of caring for the passenger and creating the most comfortable feeling from interacting with our company.

A little fantasy

Unfortunately, I don’t know the current state of this system, but if we fantasized about using it now, we could set a course for even closer contact with passengers through instant messengers, using AI to free operators from routine operations, as well as to help passengers in the process their travels.

After all, what is ultimately important for a company that operates in the tourism field? The positive emotions of people who trust you to organize their trip are important.