Tourism Breaking News
Travel is often a high-touch emotional experience, be it a holiday they have been saving up for months or a business trip with meetings and deadlines adding to the stress. Losing luggage or delays in travel can make the experience extremely unpleasant for travellers, which is why travel businesses that focus on delivering great customer experiences — both physical and digital — stand to gain big.
A recent PwC study revealed that 73% of travellers say that customer experience is the most important factor in their spending decisions and they are willing to pay 16% more if the travel experience is “great”. And for many travellers in India, the journey begins online, making CX a pivotal aspect that can make or break businesses.
For those keen on moving past the challenges the industry currently faces, delivering great customer experiences is key to success.
Headwinds the travel industry in India faces
The current macroeconomic conditions have given rise to many challenges impeding travel businesses from focusing on CX. The primary reasons for this are labour shortage, rising costs and digital transformation.
In India, the travel industry had to lay off 21.5 million people between 2020 and 2022 to cope with the effects of the pandemic, making it hard to cater to the surge with the return of travel. In 2023, this translated to short-staffed businesses with tight budgets seeking ways to deliver memorable travel experiences, or risk revenue loss.
Adopting the right technologies to ease the process is the logical next step. With the absence of a complete rip-and-replace approach across existing IT infrastructures, travel businesses are trying to figure out how to modernise their services while maintaining some level of integration with legacy systems.
These challenges have resulted in an urgent need for travel brands to invest more in backend systems for operational agility to optimise service delivery without breaking the budget or sacrificing the customer experience.
Rising to the challenge with AI
Investing in CX may seem like a lot for businesses that are still on the road to recovery. Yet, companies that do invest in CX are more likely to outperform their competitors who don’t. A McKinsey report found that organisations that focus on customer experience typically achieve three times more shareholder returns even amidst economic downturns, as opposed to those that do not.
The travel industry needs a push towards rethinking and innovation to stay ahead of the competition and win the hearts and loyalty of their customers. And as the industry continues to recover, intelligent CX solutions powered by artificial intelligence (AI) will play an increasingly critical role in helping these businesses deliver exceptional experiences to their customers, while also meeting the demand.
Investing in AI often brings about questions of heavy spending on IT infrastructure and specialised talent. But that is no longer the case with the advent of low-to-no-code CX solutions that are easy to set up, integrate well with existing systems and don’t require a lot of IT spend or expertise to deploy — a sureshot way of delivering better experiences for customers. These solutions can help businesses understand their customers at a granular level and deliver deeply personalised experiences that leave customers coming back for more.
Smarter CX to grow your business
Almost every travel experience today begins digitally. People look for travel recommendations on search engines and social media. Travellers want personalised sojourns driven by recommendations and ideas from friends, family and online travel content in the form of blogs, vlogs and social media posts.
This means businesses need to know where their customers are, understand their pain points and deliver great experiences on channels of their choice, not just for better customer service but to identify new revenue opportunities. Paying attention to your customer’s emotions is good for business too — 71% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a business that cares about their emotional state. When travel businesses can analyse the customer’s emotional state and intent, they can understand exactly which parts of the service experience are frustrating or delighting customers.
And when the solution is powered with generative AI like Zendesk AI, agents can receive an accurate summary of the customer’s issue, history and sentiment, giving them the context they need to deliver great CX. Such solutions can take it a step further by crafting perfect replies with the right tone, so agents only have to review them without writing it from scratch. This also ensures that chatbot messages answering customer queries are accurate and conversational instead of redirecting customers to a bunch of help centre links.
Advanced chatbots can tackle manual and repetitive tasks, leaving the limited support staff free to pursue higher-value tasks like finding new revenue opportunities. And travel businesses will be happy to know that such CX solutions can be easy to set up, train and maintain to help them achieve this at scale, quickly.
Consider this: A seasoned trekker looking for information on a particular Himalayan trek reaches out to your business on Instagram with queries regarding the trekking dates, fitness advisories and more. Without the right AI solutions the customer could run into a clunky chatbot with limited scope, leaving them frustrated. This customer would naturally look for other businesses that offer better experiences.
On the other hand, intelligent CX solutions would have access to the customer’s past interaction history, travel preferences, past treks, and more. It can also gauge the customer’s sentiment, arming agents with the right context, making it easier to quickly resolve the customer’s query.
Imagine a seasoned trekker getting a message, “We see that you’ve trekked in X place before and the same level of fitness is more than adequate for the upcoming trek.” It would solve his issue with a simple message. Full knowledge of the customer’s past interactions helps businesses go a step further and find opportunities to upsell. In the trekker’s scenario, if the message he or she received was, “We noticed you needed XX gear the last time around. Would you need it for the upcoming trek too?” This gives the customer a feeling of being remembered and understood, while also eliminating their task of finding the right gear. All-in-all, it makes the experience hassle-free and personalises the journey resulting in a happy customer.
If there’s one thing that can differentiate travel businesses from their competitors, it would be the quality of digital experiences they create. It helps travellers engage directly within the same conversation thread on their platform of choice, giving them a sense of agency and empowerment. It also opens up opportunities for businesses to grow revenue. The good news is that such technologies are already on the market and also cost-effective, making it accessible for travel businesses of all sizes.
Given the increased demand for better CX, it’s important for travel companies to invest in the right AI solutions that can help them engage their customers wherever they are, on whichever platform. By building memorable experiences, businesses can drive deeper customer loyalty, solidifying a competitive edge that leads to more resilient growth in the long run.
Attributed to: Vasudeva Rao Munnaluri, RVP India & SAARC, Zendesk
