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Amadeus: Delivering an Exceptional Customer Experience

By Special Guest
Karine del Moro, vice president of marketing, Confirmit
February 13, 2018

(Editor’s Note: The TMC team is at ITEXPO 2018 this week. And the cloud, communications, and customer experience are key topics of this event. Join us in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., for this event. For more details, click here.)

The hospitality division of Amadeus delivers next generation business solutions based on open, cloud technology for hospitality organizations and offers them as software as a service.

The hospitality team at Amadeus is dedicated to partnering with its customers to help adapt to new business challenges and market opportunities, differentiate the guest and brand experience, and share success with key business stakeholders.

Having incorporated more than 1,000 hospitality experts through acquisitions of companies over the years, it became critical for all frontline employees and leadership alike to preserve the relationships with customers around the world.

Real-time visibility into the customer experience became especially critical for employees at all levels to address and meet the needs of their customer base.

Before implementing an automated survey program, gathering customer feedback was often a manual process. This fostered a subjective and inconsistent invitation process. As a result, very low sample sets of responses ensued.

As Amadeus continued to grow in the hospitality space worldwide, the team needed to implement a solution that would ensure the Voice of the Customer effort successfully grew with the business.

“We needed a solution that would enable us to standardize the methods for receiving feedback, while maintaining flexibility, promoting accountability and fostering organizational success,” explained Alesha Bencivenga, director of customer support operations at Amadeus – Hospitality.

With Confirmit Horizons, Amadeus now conducts different surveys in multiple languages throughout the year, including transactional surveys and semi-annual relationship surveys. Feedback and results are then shared with relevant departments, including Customer Support, Sales, and Executives through real-time access to live dashboards and monthly reports. The data is personalized and shared with various levels of the organization based on their own needs and the information that will impact their key business decisions.

Frontline representatives have access to live dashboards on Confirmit Horizons, providing a deepened awareness to the level of the service in real time. This allows frontline employees and project managers to re-evaluate their service, immediately make changes if needed, and incorporate the constructive feedback in future interactions. Senior leadership receives overall satisfaction and Net Promoter Score results for each business unit, key accounts and the program as a whole via monthly reports, allowing them to implement process improvements in their department. The Executive Team also receives a monthly report that emphasizes overall satisfaction and NPS scores from all surveys, providing a customer-driven aspect of the business.

Continuous review of these metrics has augmented the customer-centric position that the hospitality division of Amadeus strives to represent. Finally, the Confirmit Horizons integration with Salesforce has allowed contact-specific survey responses to be shared in real time with the Amadeus hospitality team. The benefit of this insight into customer sentiment and level of satisfaction for all team members who interact directly with their customers is immeasurable.

Using a Salesforce peer recognition program, team successes are posted openly for all members of the organization to view. The hospitality Customer Support team has expanded the program to also encompass department-specific peer recognition with their LEAF (Leadership, Excellence, Accountability, Focus) program.

The hospitality division of Amadeus also leverages Confirmit Action Management alerts to engage Customer Support managers and Customer Relations in any missed expectations reported. With this added visibility, the team can re-evaluate and efficiently respond to email requests, celebrate team successes and receive immediate calls-to-action for client follow-ups. The division also has a more holistic perception of the customer journey, and of specific projects from initial contact to completed implementation.

All that has given the hospitality division of Amadeus accountability, flexibility, and competitive advantage as it continues to grow worldwide. With a company-wide NPS goal of 50 or greater, as of August 2017, the hospitality division was at 76.4. The support overall satisfaction score has reached 9.28 as of August 2017 as well, with a goal of 8.6.

Alesha Bencivenga noted: “The holistic view and deeper understanding of the customer experience that the solution provides have enhanced our ability to keep the customer as our No. 1 priority.”

The hospitality division of Amadeus was also able to adjust its internal processes for better results. For example, through the surveys and subsequent customer feedback, the team learned its frontline Customer Support team was friendly and willing to help. However, there were concerns that the representatives weren’t as knowledgeable on certain subjects, thus hindering the customer’s experience and capability to view the representative as a true expert. To address this issue, the hospitality team at Amadeus hired a training implementation specialist to ensure all new and current employees are fully ready and able to provide informed, insightful information to their customers. The hospitality division of Amadeus also implemented the Admin 201 Salesforce certification program, offering all employees the opportunity to pass the certification exam.

Following the feedback gathered from the transactional survey for Professional Services, the division created a twice-weekly standing meeting for Project Managers to work directly with Services leadership to plan out projects that are difficult to schedule or need a quick turnaround, for example. The implementation of these meetings has reduced the amount of project management overhead, cut down on mistakes in determining a project’s scope and decreased the number of escalations from customers due to long lead times.

The hospitality division of Amadeus also implemented a formal quoting process for the Sales team to determine the level of effort needed from Professional Services to deliver a specific solution. This has reduced the time that it takes for Sales to turn a quote around to a customer by reducing the possibility of inaccurate services line items or quantities in a sales order. Implementing this change has also minimized challenges with deployment by allowing the correction of order issues before delivery of the services in order to exceed a customer’s expectations during and after a project.

“The Voice of the Customer program drives our strategic theme to continue our customer intimacy strategy and increase customer satisfaction. By distributing the data, we offer employees insight into our customers’ sentiment and level of satisfaction. This information has proven to be vital to our success,” said Erin Jacobsen, vice president of customer support at Amadeus – Hospitality.

As the hospitality division of Amadeus expands its footprint by offering a cloud-based platform approach to its customers for operational needs, they will look to Confirmit. The ability to integrate the data from Confirmit Horizons to Salesforce has provided an opportunity to better drive customer interactions for all employees and within the next few months the company will be looking to expand on how the data is displayed and reported on in Salesforce.

A key focus for the next year will be using the feedback from the relationship survey in a more holistic manner. While this survey continues to provide valuable information, the worldwide scalability for area of improvement changes has remained challenging. By focusing its efforts across all business domains and regions, it can ensure that regardless of a customer’s physical location, the interaction with each department is consistent and guarantees a seamless experience with Amadeus’ hospitality team.

Karine del Moro is vice president of marketing at Confirmit (www.confirmit.com).
 

To learn more about Customer Experience, join TMC and friends this week at ITEXPO 2018. For example, there’s a 1 p.m. session tomorrow/Wednesday titled “How AI is Changing the Customer Experience.” Featured speakers include Eric Bauer of AudioCodes, Bachir Halimi of Speech Mobility, Brett Lancaster of Ricoh USA, Muthusamy Selvaraj of Cloudbreak, and moderator Jon Arnold of J Arnold & Associates.




Edited by Ken Briodagh
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