Bob Morrell, MD of Reality Training, sets out a vision of the future where more and more types of travel enquiry can be dealt overseas call-centre agents
In my opinion, travel is the perfect marketplace to outsource certain enquiry calls. Having trained in India and some other outsource countries we can see that the skills required are clearly available to travel brands. There are some distinct disadvantages, but each year that goes by, diminishes these, because the professional standards of outsourced solutions are steadily increasing.
Outsourcing does threaten some UK jobs, and all major travel brands considering this option have to balance their commitment to their staff, with their need to achieve the best results.
Going back 15 years many banks and other service organisations saw outsourcing their customer service calls as an obvious cost saver. With thousands of calls coming in every day it would be much cheaper to have them serviced abroad.
That first wave of mass outsourcing carried a significant problem: within any organisation there are only two types of demand, value demand – the calls you want (enquiries, sales calls, responses to marketing) and failure demand (problems, systemic failures, complaints).
Initially all failure demand calls were outsourced to teams who were largely unable to handle and resolve those calls. Millions of calls were then re-routed back to the UK to people who could actually deal with them, defeating the object. But thankfully, times have changed.
In India each call-centre operative we trained had: a degree, superb, grammatically perfect English, politeness and enthusiasm, and a willingness to learn and improve performance.
Now clearly, we have highly skilled call-centre people in the UK too, but for mass calls, in a volume business, the numbers alone make the Indian model very attractive. Additionally, their team managers were entirely focused on delivering great service on each call, and worked closely with their team, all day long, in a way that rarely happens in the UK. The management information was more detailed, as were the quality scores, customer satisfaction monitoring and coaching.
The really big missing is knowledge. The vast majority of call centre operatives in India, the Philippines, etc, are highly unlikely to ever visit the vast majority of destinations they are selling over the phone. The big question is, does this matter?
For transactions such as flights, hotel rooms, car hire, theatre tickets etc. do we really require our agents to have extensive knowledge of places? Or do we really want them just to take our enquiry, ask some good questions, help us understand our options, receive the booking, perhaps suggest an appropriate upgrade or an alternative and then make it happen?
With a good level of training the agents are more than able to achieve a high level of conversion, and all this is happening right now. But what’s the next level?
Could we outsource cruise bookings? Package holidays? Luxury holidays? Honeymoon bookings? Maybe we could outsource these calls to other countries such as the US, initially. Or do we bite the bullet and simply train teams in India, Spain, Bulgaria and Romania to receive and service these calls?
We must certainly be close to the tipping point where more and more types of travel enquiry can be dealt with overseas.
We have a vision of the future where, regardless of location, customer service teams are equipped to serve customers for the majority of phone and live-chat based travel enquiries.
The UK Head Offices are perfectly placed to be the support function of their outsourced partners, whilst customers will quickly get used to the concept of omni-channel and multi-cultural customer service.
To protect UK jobs we could simply re-deploy our knowledgeable staff in retail, as well as supporting and coaching roles.