7 Tips For Travel Companies To Deal With Peak-Season In Zendesk
Hi dear reader,
Happy to have you here 🚀
I imagine that if you found this article and clicked on it, you are probably here because you maybe feel a bit of a pressure due to peak season with low resources. Not to worry, you’re in the right place.
We here at ROCA live and breath Zendesk. We know that these processes are universal in the Customer Experience sphere, but we like Zendesk. Any tool can fill in these processes, but yea, passion is passion 😅
I know your pain, I’ve seen it while working with some of our clients over at Skyscanner, Lanes and Planes, Fairtiq, PON and a few others.
The context is that peak season is here and due to having less Covid restrictions, the planet has decided it wants to travel again.
There’s 2 sides:
Having had economies stagnated for quite a while, whole countries and businesses are itching to open up and re-welcome tourists. HORECA and travel companies are under a lot of pressure by governments that rely on tourism for balancing their budgets.
On the other side, there are the consumers, you and I who waited long enough and want to travel and visit places. We want out of the house, we want to visit cultures and widen our consciousness by seeing the world in a responsible manner.
These 2 factors are culminating into the fact that travel is gaining a lot of momentum (again). Tourists have to be transported to their destination and travel companies are the ones to help them. That’s why you’re probably here. Hi 👋
I know that Covid made you discontinue a lot of your staff because of lack of business, but now business is back. And it’s almost back to the level where it left off in 2020, or 2019 summer to be exact. However, your staff is 50% or even lower than it used to be before. So you’re essentially having to deal with same amount of work with 50% less staff. That must hurt. 😢
Not to worry, there are ways to make up the difference and still provide excellent customer experience. Here’s 7 things you can focus on. For ease of understanding, I’ve divided them into 2 main sections:
Self Service - You need to make up for the lack of resources so self service is your friend.
1. Tidy Knowledge Base for self service
You have to make up for the lack of resources so having a good documentation for your processes both internal and external is paramount. Customers can browse your Zendesk Knowledge Base and find answers to their inquiries themselves.
2. Answer Bot for even better self service
Use that knowledge base to your benefit. Let Ais recognise customer intent and provide article suggestion based on keywords they use to describe their issue.
3. Zendesk Messaging
Make conversations engrained into your organisation. You can deliver rich conversational experiences for your businesses that may be connected across web, mobile or social apps.
4. Use an AI tool
Be super smart about things and automate conversations and take self service to 3.0. Create meaningful experiences by being sensitive to your customers and integrating with various tools to surface booking ids, order numbers, tracking orders etc. Just as a small note, we are partners with the best tool on the market and we can help you implement excellent customer experiences.
Productivity - take control of whatever feeds into your system:
5. Rich forms
Ask customers to submit a request and categorise if for you. Based on what they will add into the form, you will be able to create a routing matrix and business rules to capture and categorise those requests so they end up in the correct queue.
6. Queue to surface daily focus for your agents
Whatever ends up in your system has to be rounded up and shown to agents so they know what to focus on. In Zendesk you are familiar with them as Views. You’d want to make sure your routing matrix is capturing all tickets, categorising them and surfacing them into the daily dashboards’ of your agents. Faster resolutions are key to keeping your customers happy.
7. Reports with Zendesk Explore
Have a good overview of what types of requests come into the system. Agent efficiency and knowledge base performance are also key to making sure you have good control of your business.
That’s about it. Obviously the above can be elaborated into a whole thesis, but I know you’re busy and you don’t have that kind of time. I’ll be lucky if I get you to even read the red headlines 😅
However, this is quick list will greatly improve your business performance during these harsh times. Don’t let yourself be overwhelmed, you are not alone in this. Also, there’s a lot of solutions to help you. We are happy to help once we understand what you’re about.
If the above helped, we’d love to hear from you. Book a FREE strategy session, we don’t bite!
By the way, this is my face, I wrote this article so if you want to love or hate me for it, tell me during a FREE strategy sesh.