Going places

The need for change

Etraveli Group, a global online travel agency and leading provider of flight technology, operates in over 75 countries — serving customers in 35 languages. With around 2,800 customer service agents, including outsourcing, the Swedish company prides itself on being the fastest, most precise way to plan a trip regardless of the distance or complexity.

“Due to mergers and acquisitions, we had a landscape of different customer support systems with different focus, forming a barrier for us to improve customer experience and efficiency,” said Mikael Örtelind, CTO at Etraveli Group. “We needed to establish a clear omnichannel roadmap and consolidate on the system side. We were at that point missing an efficient workforce management system, so it was hard to see into workloads, especially with our outsourced partners. So, we decided to create one global platform through a single investment that would benefit all parts of the business.”

Embracing hybrid working

After considering its options, Etraveli Group decided to standardize on Genesys Cloud. “Genesys met our requirements and gave us the biggest bang for our buck,” added Örtelind.

Connecting seven contact centers in Greece, Sweden, China, Egypt and India, Genesys Cloud enables agents to efficiently serve the travel needs of customers through inbound, outbound, chat and email communications — all managed from one desktop application.

While rolling out the new solution, Etraveli Group felt the full force of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“During the crisis, most people were forced to work from home,” said Pia Vemmelund, Chief Customer Officer at Etraveli Group. “We got great support from Genesys and our partner, GlobalConnect, and switched over to Genesys Cloud market by market — in some cases over a weekend. With all the constant changes in airline policies and government regulations the workload on customer services increased dramatically. Our agents were amazing throughout and dealt with twice as many calls and three times more emails as customers sought refunds or to amend travel plans.”

Removing blind spots and engaging employees

Etraveli Group used Genesys to help prioritize customers based on various business requirements. “We can now prioritize based on their travel date and other relevant business parameters,” said Gurpreet Sawhney, WFM Director at Etraveli Group. “Secure IVR payments have also been working well and help us improve customer experience.”

To further improve employee training and quality management, Etraveli Group tapped into the Genesys AppFoundry^® Marketplace. It has integrated its IVR system with Shelf knowledge automation, reducing training and onboarding times for new hires. To streamline quality management and evaluate agent performance across channels, the company took advantage of Scorebuddy.

“We also integrated our EDVIN core flight sales and administration system,” said Sawhney. “And we’re able to share these data sources with our Amelia chatbots. Genesys open APIs also allowed us to deploy a chat translation tool, removing language barriers for our agents. We expect to reach three million chat messages by the end of this year.”

Automation has also reduced the time and effort needed for frequent WFM tasks like performance reporting and agent scheduling. Genesys has helped improve visibility into third-party support teams, too.

“Even though we hired specialists to manually gather data and prepare resource plans, our outsourced operations were a blind spot,” added Sawhney. “Now, with Genesys Workforce Engagement Management, all customer service sites and channels are on the same system. So, it is much easier to spot bottlenecks and be more efficient. That’s led to a 10 percent improvement in schedule adherence among our BPO partners.”

In addition, Etraveli Group implemented the Genesys Cloud EX™ solution to manage and engage 300 employees in its back office departments. “As a long-time Genesys customer that’s driven improvements across both customer and employee experience, we saw an opportunity to utilize Genesys Cloud EX for our employees outside of the contact center,” said Sawhney. “Genesys Cloud EX has provided a solution focused on employee experience to help us accomplish our objectives.”

Uncovering insights with analytics

Etraveli Group has come through one of the most difficult periods the travel industry has known — and it’s strongly positioned for success. “Our data used to sit in different systems,” said Vemmelund. “Now, it’s all in one place. With Genesys speech and text analytics, we can identify which channels drive the highest resolution and move customers towards those channels. Chat is a prime example. It’s really a fantastic feature.”

Other analytics use cases include sentiment analysis and topic spotting. For instance, it can identify the nature of calls that increase customer effort and handling time — or potential stressful conversations where intervention may be needed.

“Rather than focusing on orders, we’re now able to focus on customer experience,” Sawhney concluded. “For example, we understand better why they are contacting us and how much support they need. Our employees are 15 percent more productive and we’ve made a 10 percent savings on IVR systems and call transfers.”