The Evolution of Hospitality’s Customer Support Model

Anna Ransom

customer support model blog

By: Ken Wilson, Head of Global Customer Support, Hospitality, Amadeus

 

As we progress into what we hope will become a better year for us personally, professionally, and for our industry at large, I’d like to share with you some positive news regarding Hospitality’s Customer Support Team. 2020 started off much like any recent year, but we kicked it off with a vision of ‘what if we could create a Customer Support team that focused on seamless simplicity for our customers’ and ended the year with an incredible foundation from which to build upon in 2021.

Over the past twelve months, we reviewed the skills and resources of our many remote teams that joined us through acquisitions and united them under one umbrella organization. For years, these 17 locations had been separately supporting core systems like iHotelier, Guest Management Solutions, and Amadeus Sales & Event Management to name a few. To streamline processes and more effectively support our customers, we have had to not only look at how we support each of our products in depth, but also how to rework our structure to realize this vision of a truly harmonized and effective global team.

Now we are well on our way! We have consolidated contact center teams in the Philippines, Spain, and Costa Rica; established competency centers in secondary locations; brought our teams together using the same integrated telephony and CRM systems; and developed standard operating procedures that are applied across the globe. I am pleased to share that our teams are embracing this new way of working and we are already seeing the comradery necessary to establish these roots.

So, what do these changes mean for our customers?

Let’s highlight 3 key areas:

1.     24x7x365 availability: Our support team is now available live whenever our customer needs us. They can expect a standardized case handling experience with regional expertise and high severity cases will receive a “follow-the-sun” response until resolution.

2.     Standardized approach to measuring success: With about 800 support cases per day across products, we now track the success of customer inquiries, satisfaction, etc. in a standardized way so we can make continuous improvements across our team.

3.     Common method of case escalation: Customers will now have a common and simple way to escalate incidents and problems for all our products with our new harmonized approach.

 

As we celebrate the progress made so far, our vision is nothing short of seamless simplicity. We are also looking far beyond our current plans to introduce integrated technology that enables our customers to obtain contextual answers when they need it and without having to speak to an agent. If an agent is needed, we aim to make the interaction quick and easy whether through the application, the customer community portal, by chat, or by picking up the phone. When reaching Customer Support, we envision the agent having the information they need at their fingertips to reduce the need for repetition, the ability to resolve the inquiry at first contact, and capability to get the customer on their way to success quickly.

In short, our mantra is “let’s make it easy for our customers to do their job and reduce friction in their interactions with Customer Support whenever and wherever we can.”

We are excited for the progress made so far and look ahead to continued innovation to more effectively support our customers. We believe our customers will appreciate this focus on global, timely interactions based on seamless simplicity within Hospitality’s Customer Support team.