Like many companies during the pandemic, Priceline experienced a massive increase in demand for quick and efficient customer service. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Priceline’s call centre volume increased by three times.
Thousands of customers flooded the contact centre in search of opportunities to change or cancel their travel itineraries, as airports closed their doors. Suddenly, the waiting times required to speak to an agent became excessive and even unreasonably long. While, for a traditional contact centre, this would have been a challenge without an obvious solution, Priceline was already working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its contact centre.
Using the omnichannel, cloud-based Amazon Connect contact centre, Priceline was able to adapt and adjust its contact centre strategy to handle the sudden spike in demand. Rerouting calls and implementing new features meant the company could quickly reduce backlogs, while simultaneously opening the door to remote work for Priceline agents.
Staying Agile and Efficient in Emergencies
For travel and hospitality companies, staying efficient and agile was crucial to surviving the pandemic. Organisations needed to show their customers they had their best interests at heart for any chance of those consumers returning following the end of travel restrictions.
As a global leader in online travel, Priceline has been evolving and expanding rapidly for some time now. The greater the company grew, the more it realised the on-premises, hardwired telephony system it had used until now was no longer flexible enough.
Priceline was responsible for running its IVR itself and contracted with business process outsourcing companies to deliver contact centre agents across five call distributors. According to Jennifer Featherling, the senior contact centre director at Priceline, the older CX solution was stretched over various systems, requiring a lot of manual work.
In this previous environment, the company was unable to quickly pivot, which simply wasn’t an option in an increasingly fast-moving industry. In April 2019, Priceline began taking calls through the Amazon Connect service instead – an environment offering one set of tools for routing, real-time and historical analytics, and task management.
Responding to Any Situation with AWS
The integration of Amazon Connect technology meant Priceline could create a more efficient customer service strategy, optimizing menu options and automating queues for call-backs.
This update also meant the company was more prepared to respond in an agile fashion when the pandemic hit. Making updates to the interactive voice response and routing of on-premises contact centres would have taken a lot longer, and agents would have been forced to stay in the office.
Using the cloud-based Amazon Connect environment gave Priceline the freedom to shift its team to working remotely without having to compromise on customer experience. The brand was even able to cope with the sudden spike in volume. According to Featherling, her team could respond faster than ever, with 1,000 agents working from home and using Amazon Connect to support clients.
The company also introduced new call back queues for customers, to ensure clients could spend less time waiting on hold for a response to their questions. Ease of implementation also meant Priceline could stay ahead of an influx of calls during the pandemic. Today, Amazon technology continues to support the agency in helping customers to navigate unpredictable circumstances, like the 2021 snowstorm in the US that left much of Texas with no power.
Amazon Connect supports Priceline in better-predicting customer needs and adjusting, adapting, and transforming based on new requirements for customer service. Conducting customer surveys allowed Priceline to determine their audience’s preference for the call back queue, which has prompted the company to keep the technology around even when the agency isn’t dealing with excessive wait times (such as those caused by the pandemic).
The company also introduced a new, interactive voice response menu, making it easier for customers to communicate what they need fast. Changes to the menu are as simple as sending messages into Amazon Polly – a service capable of changing text into speech. With no need for experienced developers to implement these changes, Priceline has been able to innovate much faster.
The consumption-based model of pricing for AWS solutions has also supported Priceline in optimizing costs by paying only for what the team uses. According to Featherling, the pay-as-you-go model means the business can scale up when they’re experiencing higher volume or scale down when that volume begins to diminish.
Moving Forward with AWS
Looking into the future, Priceline is aware the demands for enhanced customer experiences are only going to continue growing in the years ahead. Moving forward, Priceline will be further expanding its use of the AWS ecosystem in several areas. The company wants to begin monitoring and using AWS resources in its Slack channels, as well as Amazon Chime chat rooms.
Priceline also plans on deploying chat for agent-to-agent interactions. This service enables agents to meet the needs of customers without transferring them to other professionals for various tasks, like rebooking or pricing. Instead of tying multiple agents into one call, one agent can connect with another via chat for the information required.
Contact Lens for Amazon Connect is another feature Priceline is exploring for the coming years. This technology would allow the company to gain a better understanding of customer sentiment and view the trends in customer conversations. Technology such as this could lead to better business decisions for the Priceline brand. What’s more, through the real-time capabilities of the service, supervisors will be able to deliver more proactive assistants to agents while calls are in progress.
Switching to Amazon Connect allowed Priceline to function more efficiently, despite facing significant challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Automated functions have also freed up Priceline’s developers to innovate in their responses to customer support in an ever-changing environment.
