Customer Service in
the Travel Industry
Challenges
Travel and hospitality is one of the most customer-centric industries, where customer service plays a crucial role in shaping the overall experience of the traveler. However, customer service operations in the travel industry are often faced with several common problems.
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Lack of personalisation where customers are treated as just another transaction rather than individuals with unique needs and preferences.
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The complexity of the travel booking process, which can lead to confusion and frustration among customers.
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Delays cancellations, and other unforeseen circumstances causing significant disruptions to travel plans, leading to angry and dissatisfied customers.
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The industry's 24/7 nature meaning that customer service teams need to be available around the clock, which can be challenging for businesses to manage efficiently.
These issues can all impact the quality of customer service and consequently the customer experience within the travel industry. Businesses need to adopt new technologies and develop their internal processes to overcome these challenges in order to improve their overall customer satisfaction and retain their customers.
The Fluentic app makes for a better and faster customer support experience, strengthening your long-term relationship with your customers and allowing more efficient internal workflows.
Below are practical examples of how businesses in the travel industry have benefited from implementing Fluentic as part of their customer service.
Why to automate multilingual customer service
One of the primary reasons why multilingual customer service is crucial in the travel industry is that customers come from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and languages. Without multilingual support, travel businesses risk alienating non-English speaking customers, leading to poor customer experiences and negative feedback.
Multilingual customer support also demonstrates a commitment to customer satisfaction and shows that the business values all passengers, regardless of their background. This can help to build loyalty and trust with customers, leading to increased brand preference and higher customer retention rates.
However, to meet the language requirements traditionally travel businesses have had to invest in language training, interpreting services and hire customer support agents with various language skills. This poses challenges to recruitment when businesses have to focus on language skills rather than other skills that could be more beneficial to the role. Many language skills are also hard to find in the pool of potential candidates.
While phone calls as the service channel still plays an important role in handling the most complex and sensitive customer cases, it is also the most costly and in many ways least efficient customer communication channel. The more customer cases can be handled through digital channels like chat, email, WhatsApp etc. the more time- and cost-efficient the customer service operations become.
Benefits
Fluentic’s AI-powered translation solution for customer service automation answers to many of the common challenges in the travel industry. Here are the benefits our clients have experienced.
Cost savings
By removing the language barriers, customer support operations can be handled more cost-efficiently from a centralised location, enabling 24/7 customer service.
Improved customer experience
Providing customer support in the customer’s preferred language helps build loyalty and trust, leading to increased brand preference and higher customer retention rates.
Low downtime
Any customer support agent can serve any customer. This means low downtime, which leads to improved efficiency and time management.
Ability to react quickly
With centralised, scalable customer support, businesses can quickly react to sudden peaks in customer enquiries.
Quicker response times
Because the customer support is centralised, the queuing times are shorter and customers get answers to their questions faster.