Companies of all sizes in the travel and hospitality sector are facing new challenges when it comes to serving their audience. Clarity, for instance, is a business travel agency dedicated to saving its customers money and time when travelling. The organisation serves brands from a wide variety of sectors, including infrastructure, retail, and higher education.
Over the years, Clarity has developed a selection of core products to help drive more meaningful services to customers. This includes the “Go2Book” booking tool, which allows customers to book everything from cars to hotels and air travel on one platform. There is “Go2Track” for mitigating global risk and tracking team members anywhere in the world. Plus, “Go2Insight” uses AI to deliver bespoke reporting functions for customers to drive down costs.
Clarity attempts to cover all of the possible bases connected to customer services for its clients. However, part of staying ahead of the curve in this ever-changing environment is ensuring employees on the back-end have the right support and resources too.
Improving Customer Service Management with Clarity
As a multi-product B2B company, Clarity wanted to ensure their customer service teams were capable of working in sync with their operations team, to allow for more efficiency, and better business outcomes. Currently, Clarity has several expert teams specializing in different sectors, so they can tailor their service to the individual needs of different customers.
According to Customer Service Manager Annette Ritson, and Head of Online Operations, Roxanne Owen, partnering with Freshworks helped Clarity to create the kind of crucial backend environment required to keep their innovative CX strategy running smoothly.
Before embracing the Freshdesk environment for helpdesk management and workforce support, Clarity was reliant on team mailboxes located in Outlook for the collation of customer emails. After emails were collected, they also needed to be manually distributed throughout the various teams in the ecosystem for action. This was a slow and inefficient process for the growing company.
According to Roxanne, there were also significant issues with pulling reports for the analysis of performance for clients. If a client approached the team claiming they had missed an SLA, this led to a long-winded and complex process to establish the service provided.
Switching to a New Workflow with Freshdesk
When the pandemic hit, having a devastating impact on the travel industry, Clarity saw major disruption to its operations – much like many other hospitality brands. The company decided they needed to act fast to ensure they were available to support customers properly, whether this meant getting them back to their home country or helping to move agents around the UK.
Delivering this kind of service and bespoke support wasn’t simply a 9-to-5 challenge, it was something the company needed to work on day and night. Freshdesk made this possible, ensuring the customer could contact the team on any platform – night or day. With Freshdesk, Clarity maintained full visibility of the ticket and understood the history of the inquiry.
Clarity made sure they could be in constant touch with travellers using Freshdesk, assuring them they would be able to get back home during a nerve-wracking period. Clarity didn’t just use the Freshdesk ecosystem for customer communication either. As the months passed, the brand also dealt with issues like refunds and going through administration for customers who didn’t travel due to restrictions.
The Freshdesk environment also allowed Clarity to evolve and change its workflows when the pandemic hit, and more people were forced to shift into a remote working model. According to Annette, Clarity was able to get a workforce of 650 people working remotely in under 72 hours using Freshdesk. All of this was done without the loss of crucial information. Transitioning to a remote working strategy would have been practically impossible in Annette’s eyes without the power of Freshdesk.
Optimising Workflows and Teams
During the last 12 months, Clarity has enhanced its branch setup within Freshdesk, realizing it was overly complicated compared to their actual needs. The company simplified the workflows by making sure each branch only had one group, which significantly reduced the confusion involved in using the system. After this, the company reworked their workflows for ticket assignment too.
The ticketing strategy became a skill-based, automated routing solution thanks to Freshdesk. Group and ticket routing were also available based on customer domain, so the brand could assign dedicated staff to deal with VIP travellers.
According to Anette, the Clarity company has now put a lot of automation behind their service tiering approach to make sure the rules look at agent abilities and the priority level of each customer. Bespoke SLAs have been established for each client too, so Clarity can ensure they’re meeting needs consistently. By using the correct routing and business model strategies through Freshdesk, Clarity can ensure customer service is better than ever.
Clarity measured the NPS, CSAT, and Customer Effort Scores of their clients to determine customer experience following these changes. According to the company, after 22,000 responses, the numbers currently stand at an NPS score of 81, CES of 94%, and CSAT of 96%, representing fantastic results for the brand.
Annette went on to note that since introducing Freshdesk, the company has managed over 1.7 million tickets and around 1,000 emails per day. Freshdesk has emerged as an essential part of the company’s customer support and communications strategy, with teams now performing more efficiently than ever.
In some scenarios, the Clarity online support team has also begun using the Freshdesk messaging channel to provide speedier resolutions to problems. Chat has helped to deliver more customer support in real-time, and it allows Clarity to guide travellers to self-service when they’re making bookings. Chat is integrated into Freshdesk, so any chat conversation can also instantly be converted into a ticket in Freshdesk if the issue couldn’t be resolved through messaging.
Going forward, Annette revealed Clarity is looking for opportunities to expand its live chat offering while reviewing agent-assist options to provide a consistent level of service. The brand is exploring new opportunities to provide customers with a variety of customer service options over the phone, email, and Freshdesk Messaging. Plus, Clarity is introducing a new customer portal to provide clients with the information they need to make informed decisions quickly.
