Travel website flythomascook.com is rolling out a hosted
customer self-service system to reduce the number of calls handled
by contact centre staff by 30%.
The hosted system, from RightNow Technologies, will let
holidaymakers search the flythomascook.com site using natural
language queries. It is scheduled to be switched on in the first
week in July.
Last summer the travel firm found that it was inundated with
customers making telephone enquiries after using the website, and
it had to take staff from other parts of its operations to handle
the calls.
“We saw a mountain of enquiries in May and June 2005,” said
flythomascook.com director Tony Milsom.
To avoid similar difficulties this year, Milsom considered three
options: a chat facility on the website to allow customers to
“talk” to call centre staff, software to enable call centre staff
to handle more calls, and improved self-service functionality.
The RightNow system uses a self-learning database that can be
configured using weightings on the keywords within a query to
ensure that a customer’s enquiry produces appropriate answers.
This has enabled flythomascook.com to teach the system to
recognise the difference between lost luggage and checked luggage,
for example, said Milsom.
The process of “teaching” the system involved the holiday
company contacting reference users, including Gloucestershire
County Council, to see how to optimise keyword searches on its
website.
Read article:
Maritz Travel’s business process optimisation
roll-out