Travel firms should not rely too heavily on technology in the post-Covid era because “you can’t automate reassurance”.
That is the view of Peter Shanks, UK and Ireland managing director of Silversea Cruises, who told a Travolution Business Breakfast the line had relied heavily on technology during the pandemic, in particular by automating manual refund processes.
Yet Shanks argued: “What people have really wanted in the last year, and still today, is firstly to understand the protocols and secondly they want to know ‘Should I go? How do I go? How does it work?’”
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He said: “You can’t automate that. The talk time between customers and agents has increased and that is good.
“We don’t want to automate everything. If customers or agents want to talk to us, we need to resource ourselves to do that for the foreseeable future, probably for the next 18 months.”
Jo Migom, chief digital and marketing officer for online agency Thomas Cook, reported the company is currently seeing seven customer contacts per booking as holidaymakers seek information and advice on post-pandemic travel.
She suggested balancing investment in people and in technology was “challenging” but “vital” to driving customer loyalty.
Migom argued: “It’s difficult to assess the investment in contact centre staff adequately and to have the right Service Level Agreements. You don’t want to overstaff because, hopefully, after Covid the number of contacts per booking will settle down.”
Will Plummer, chief executive of travel financial services provider Trust My Group, said: “We would have been having a very different conversation in 2019. Back then technology was riding the crest of a wave. Covid has brought the human element back and agents are on the rise.”
But he asked: “Is that sustainable? And how does technology work with how operations are changing?”
A Babble survey of 55 travel businesses presented at the breakfast found two-thirds claimed to have a focus on ‘new customer communications strategies’. But just 11% used chatbots to communicate, compared with 84% which used phones, 100% email, 57% a contact centre and 45% social media.