One year after Travelocity soft-launched its Customer 1st
Guarantee, the company said last week that its social media response times to
customers are the fastest among the major U.S. full-service OTAs.
The initiative, begun last February, was designed to respond
to customers quickly 24/7 via social media platforms including Facebook and
Twitter (@travelocity and @travelocityhelp), said Naaz Nichols, senior director of
customer contact.
"As part of Travelocity's mission statement, which is
to inspire people to travel and be their champion throughout the travel
journey, we really wanted to set out in the latter part of 2015 to really
refine what that meant in terms of what we offered our customers," Nichols
said. "So we embarked on a number of qualitative as well as quantitative
studies, and what we found was that service was as important to consumers as
anything else that a travel company could offer."
Travelocity found that the most important thing to clients,
especially those currently on a trip, was a single point of contact and a fast
response time, she said. Considering Travelocity's existing presence on
Facebook and Twitter, expanding customer service to those channels made sense.
"Along with Facebook and Twitter being the most
pervasive social media channels, they are both also channels where Travelocity
already has a significant following with our customers, which makes it an
optimal place to connect for customer service, as well," Nichols said.
To measure how the company is performing on social media
with regard to customer service, Travelocity recently commissioned a study by
the social media analytics firm Socialbakers, which completed a manual analysis
of 10,000 user posts and responses on both Facebook and Twitter accounts of
major U.S. OTA brands from July 1 to Sept. 30, 2016.
It found that Travelocity responded the fastest in both
cases, with an average response time of 23 minutes on Facebook and 15 minutes
on Twitter.
Nichols said Travelocity considers that response time "best
in class."
She attributed the difference between the response times on
Facebook and Twitter to customers' tendency to contact Travelocity on Facebook
as well as to the fact that Twitter messages tend to be more direct, while
Facebook messages can come from a variety of places, such as the company's
wall, messages or even comments on posts.
Since the program's launch, Travelocity said it fields "thousands
of inquiries per month" via social channels. Inquiries the OTA receives on
social channels mirror the inquiries the company receives through its call
center, with the top reasons being hotel cancellations or modifications or
airline cancellations or modifications. In both cases, most are initiated by
consumers, Nichols said.
A flexible number of people staff the team that responds to
social media inquiries. Nichols said "roughly about 10 at any given time"
staff the team, but more agents are working during peak service hours as well
as during events like winter storms when travel disruptions are expected.
"When we look at [satisfaction] scores from customers
who are being serviced through this channel by this team relative to all other
customers, we actually see much higher satisfaction scores," Nichols said.
"So that tells us two things: We're doing a great job
and living the promise of our mission statement through this particular channel
and this group of agents; [and] we're turning what could be a potentially
negative experience or a bad taste in a customer's [or] a potential traveler's
mouth into a positive," she said.