For many travel brands the customer communication rulebook will be completely rewritten as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Even those that learned from the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökullvolcano in Iceland in 2010, which shut down large swathes of the European and transatlantic airspace, faced disruption at a scale never seen before in every corner of the industry and in every region.
Travelers were frustrated, scared and unsure about their plans. Brands were equally uncertain about the future.
PhocusWire spoke to Farhan Mohammad, global head of travel and hospitality at
Salesforce
, about how the company helped many of its customers through the COVID-19 outbreak and what lessons should be noted by those looking to be better prepared for disruption of any kind.
* Scroll to the foot of the interview for a list of links and resources.
Can you share with us, broadly, your take on how well - or, indeed, not - travelers have been dealt with during the initial phases of the coronavirus outbreak?
What we saw from travel and hospitality brands that leveraged the Salesforce platform during COVID-19 is that their customers and employees were top priorities. As it pertains directly to travelers, our customers leveraged many components of the platform in order to deal with, and take care of travelers, as well as take on new business models.
Salesforce Customer 360 Service, Communities, Marketing and Salesforce Care allowed brands to listen and respond to travelers any time and from anywhere, to deliver on self-service capabilities quickly, and message effectively across all channels. A global pandemic was not something that any brands planned for, however they were able to manage during the initial phases of the outbreak by leveraging technology, and I'm happy that Salesforce was part of that.
Would you agree that given the nature of the pandemic's rapid spread across the planet, some travel brands would potentially have been caught out with how to cope with that sudden influx of customer issues?
When the pandemic first hit, travel and hospitality was one of the industries hit hardest by the sudden influx of customer issues caused by refunds, cancellations, and rebookings. Contact centers were overwhelmed with high call volume, leading to extreme wait times that left both travelers and agents frustrated.
Call center agents were being asked to work-from-home and oftentimes they didn't have the tools or technology to help them properly scale for the volume. In fact, one of Europe's leading airlines saw an increase in volume of 6x when the crisis started, and another's website crashed because of the sheer number of people on their site.
Luckily, Salesforce was able to work with these brands to help them immediately stabilize, not only offloading the volume of increased call-center inquiries through self-service solutions, but also providing agents with a single source of truth for those inquiries that required both escalation and human intervention.
If there is one, slightly fortunate aspect of the timing of the coronavirus outbreak, it's that it has come during a period where digital is omnipresent in society and can be of huge help to brands. What platforms or systems can be deployed to assist customer service staff?
Not only is digital omnipresent, it has allowed brands both small and large to be nimble and agile, and react to the unforeseen quickly. During this time, many of our customers leveraged Salesforce Customer 360 Service, the world's #1 trusted service solution.
By implementing Salesforce Customer 360 Service, these brands have been able to prioritize the health, safety and well-being of their guests and the communities they serve during this time.
Customer 360 Service is cloud-based and can seamlessly be deployed and optimized from anywhere, allowing customers like family-friendly resort Great Wolf Lodge to empower their service agents to solve cases quickly, at scale and across any channel.
These agents were able to handle calls from home and address the concerns of each guest promptly, while maintaining guest satisfaction levels. Empowering their service teams with the right tools was imperative to building trust with their guests and being safe during this time. Plus, step-by-step guided workflows and training ensure every team member is up-to-date on the latest policies and procedures during this time.
After equipping their agents to serve customers from home, Great Wolf Lodge's focus shifted to spreading happiness to those on the frontlines of this pandemic. With their "Nights for Nurses" campaign, guests were encouraged to use promotion code "THANKYOU" to plan a future stay.
For each booking, Great Wolf Lodge agreed to donate a free night’s stay to a nurse so they can enjoy time off with their family. Tapping into the Salesforce Platform and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, the resort was able to promote this new campaign to 13.5 million guests with a curated email push encouraging guests to participate.
Alongside the one-to-one aspect of customer service, what can you tell us about broader communication techniques that can be used during this phase?
It’s important for customer service departments to leverage technology in order to meet and communicate with travelers on the channels they prefer. Self-service is a preferred channel that utilizes customer portals, which are essential hubs for up-to-date information on policies and communications.
These portals provide a 24/7 self-service community that includes links to FAQs, Knowledge articles, and Case Management so that customers can find answers on their own. Travelers also prefer channels that include Live Chat capabilities through SMS, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, or WhatsApp.
With Live Chat, agents are then able to handle multiple digital interactions simultaneously, helping more customers versus a typical single-threaded phone conversation. And with both the self-service and live chat scenarios, brands must take advantage of AI, Bots and workflow automation to handle the majority of inquiries, leaving agents to work on the most urgent cases that require human interaction
And, finally in this phase, there must be some consideration given to the service agents themselves? Many will be working remotely and also having to "skill-up", so how can a brand help to reduce any issues that might arise
I firmly believe engaged employees are the lifeblood for travel and hospitality companies since they have one of the biggest impacts on your travelers. Engaged employees deliver better customer experiences and they care for your business like it was their own. However, in order to have engaged employees, you need to provide them with the tools they need to do their job well.
During the crisis, Hornblower Cruises made employee support their number one priority. After the shelter-in-place order, Hornblower leveraged Salesforce Care, specifically Einstein Bots, to set up an Employee Help Desk and provide resources and assistance with unemployment, insurance, debt relief, and healthcare.
As recovery efforts continue, travel and hospitality brands will need to turn to technology to enable and train employees. As employees return, teams will need to be cross trained on operations and provide experiences at levels that meet traveler expectations. In addition to operational skills, employees will need to be trained on how to treat customers with empathy and help them understand new policies, precautions and safety measures.
Brands have created new approaches, processes, and procedures based on what they have learned during the outbreak, which will need to be communicated to employees.
With myTrailhead, a learning experience platform, travel and hospitality companies can skill up employees at scale with a reinvented and fun approach to learning that is customizable to their brand and personalized for every employee.
In addition to guided training, employees need to feel connected and a part of a community. Some have been working from home while others have had recent hardships. Travel and hospitality companies need to create a collaborative work environment. An employee community, as well as real-time collaboration tools such as Quip, provide a virtual space for your employees to gather, communicate and learn.
Even though plenty in this discussion has been about the human factor, customer service is increasingly reliant on analytics to understand how well it is working. This might scare some brands - so what can they do to make this a more comfortable introduction to their processes?
Data within the travel and hospitality industry is growing at an exponential rate, as providers, distributors, and travelers increasingly create and deploy large volumes of data--from social media posts and travel reviews, to location and GPS based data, to IoT data from ships, aircraft and hotels, to operational and marketing data!
Oftentimes, it can be very overwhelming and simply too much data for humans to consume and use effectively. The key to harnessing this data and making it actionable is through intelligent analytics. In order for analytics to be effective, there are three things that must be considered.
The first is to bring data from across your organization, and across all systems, in order to get on-demand access to crucial insights wherever and whenever you need them. Then, once that data is pulled in, it's time to work smarter by leveraging artificial intelligence to make decisions faster, make employees more productive, and make travelers happier.
Finally, you must focus on the outcomes by tailoring analytics to your business, enabling you to take action and improve outcomes through precise recommendations and specific guidance.
This is your opportunity to future-proof your platform in order to support how travelers expect to engage in the future. To build long term resiliency, companies will need to connect to all their data, and leverage analytics and artificial intelligence to make the best decisions for their customers, employees and company at large.
Many brands will already now be through this phase and working on recovery, although we mustn't rule out similar issues coming back again soon if the pandemic increases in intensity again after brands attempt to resume operations. What should they be doing to ensure they have the right strategy and tools in place to swing back into action again, if needed?
To support the initial response to COVID-19, Salesforce launched Salesforce Care, a suite of solutions free for 90-days, designed to help businesses stabilize during the initial phase of the crisis. Now, as COVID-19 containment improves and the economy begins to restart, a more complicated recovery phase lies ahead.
Businesses and other organizations will need to stay apprised of, and adhere to, ever-changing local and federal guidelines. They’ll need new ways of planning, managing and monitoring employee and workforce readiness; facilities preparedness; and emergency management response.
They’ll need strong collaboration across departments, and tools to make data-driven decisions quickly and communicate to employees, partners and customers at scale.
To address recovery, Salesforce recently launched Work.com to help businesses and communities safely reopen. Work.com includes new solutions to accelerate how travel and hospitality brands recover and ensure they have the right strategy and tools in place, including employee wellness assessment; shift management; and contact tracing.
To tie it all together, the Work.com Command Center brings all data streams together so that businesses and communities can make more informed decisions.
Work.com overview demonstration
Confidence in the process of travel and providers of services is likely to be a fragile concept for quite some time into the future. How might a company think about restoring some of that trust?
As travel and hospitality companies work toward recovery, rebuilding trust becomes critical. Your passengers, guests and employees must feel confident that you are focused on their health, safety and wellbeing, and that you are taking proactive measures to safeguard your airplanes, hotels rooms and cruise ships.
Re-engagement with travelers requires transparency in communications at the right time to the right person. Many new requests and questions will arise in the future, and employees need to be trained on how to respond. They will have to be able to empathize with the traveler, and understand the stress they might be going through.
Brands must put the right technology in place to empower employees to be successful in communicating this empathy and trust to the traveler. The goal is to increase confidence, encourage travelers and capture new business.
Brands must be able to clearly outline the measures they have taken on safety for travelers, as well as personalize the messaging to match the sentiment of customer concerns.
What, specifically, could a brand do to reassure its customers that a service is safe and adheres to the intense hygiene standards that are likely to come into force?
The Salesforce platform opens up countless possibilities to innovate for your customers around new policies and procedures. There is no better way to instill confidence than to deliver transparency in the form of consumer-facing engagement apps that show results of inspections, audits and safety protocols.
We've seen partners respond too - for example, our partners at PwC have been out in front helping clients with COVID-19 responses, leading with the perspective that "Safety is the New Loyalty.
Customers will choose brands who are most likely to reinforce safety and cleanliness, and in fact a Travel Sentiment survey that PwC conducted shows that travelers in April ranked brand trust - including safety and cleaning - as their top priority.
PwC has been helping a global airline since the crisis unfolded, beginning with financial planning, and is now looking at tools built on the Salesforce platform to keep employees and travelers safe at scale, by enforcing cleaning and safety controls, policies, and periodic audits.
It seems that business travel will be one of the last segments of the industry to find its feet once more. What recommendations would you give companies, their travel managers and partners to help in this area?
We are seeing economies opening up, and brands transitioning their employees back to work. This is the first step in returning to business travel, and Salesforce is playing a critical role in this with Work.com. As employees begin returning to work, the next step will be resuming business travel.
Travel and hospitality companies have the opportunity to transform and re-engage corporate travelers and travel managers with up-to-date messaging, communications, interactions and support as confidence begins to accelerate and normalize. By making the individual corporate traveler feel comfortable and safe, this will lead to meetings and events in the future as well as deliver a more stable revenue stream to companies.
United Airlines is a great example of a company using Salesforce to deliver an even stronger experience for its corporate and agency travel customers.
Through Sales, Marketing, and Communities, United Airlines has created a centralized hub providing travel policies, restrictions and communications, as well as allowing corporate travel managers to handle activities, contract management, volumes, vouchers, upgrades, ancillaries, etc., with real time dashboards and reports.
We've heard a lot in recent years about personalization in the travel industry. Do you think the "new normal" will follow that pathway or are other opportunities going to arise instead?
As we transition to a new normal, personalization is more important than ever before. Over these last few months, companies have learned they need to understand who their travelers are, at a more personalized level. Then they need to tailor messaging, content, promotions and engagement for each individual traveler.
Travelers are looking to brands now more than ever before to deliver a completely different level of service, as well as safety. It’s critical travel and hospitality brands are able to communicate and deliver this at a much more personal level, while understanding and empathizing with the traveler’s concerns and hesitations.
The crisis has, consciously and perhaps unconsciously, given brands the opportunity to alter how they interact and then engage with customers. What examples have you seen and how might those approaches become standard over time?
The crisis demonstrated that in order to quickly adapt business processes and operations during unforeseen circumstances, like a global pandemic, brands need to have a digital-first mindset. A great example of this is Common.
Common serves the co-living market, using technology to better serve existing members and help others in their communities, all while keeping employees safe. Common innovated their business model during the crisis by shifting to virtual tours for their apartments.
Not only was this the safe thing to do, it also helped drive business. Virtual tours increased by 66%, and almost 30% of people taking a tour submitted an apartment application that same day.
Because their operations were built from the ground up to be completely digital in every aspect, it was easy for them to move solely to virtual touring, and this will likely be a lasting trend going forward.
Personalization and customized relationships are only as good as the data that can be collected, so how should brands adopt a strategy in this area that works for them?
Data that isn't actionable brings little to no value to your brand and customers. Travel and hospitality companies with legacy systems face challenges unifying customer data, which can lead to friction in traveler journeys, making it difficult to deliver unique, personalized experiences.
Understanding traveler preference, behavior, historical transactions, cross-channel interactions and data points from external sources will drive hyper-personalized engagement with travelers and ultimately lead to loyalty.
In order to move forward with this strategy, it is imperative that brands first access and integrate all traveler data, from all data sources. This will allow you to create a “Golden Record,” or “Traveler 360” profile, which includes booking information, social data, past transactions, traveler preferences, history, status, and other relevant third-party information.
By understanding more about your traveler, you’ll have a better chance to anticipate their needs and behavior. Based on their profile, as well as “look-alike” travelers, Artificial Intelligence can help turn past data into probabilities, along with “next best action.”
With those insights, you can communicate more intelligently, as well as anticipate traveler issues and future needs. These revolutionary new experiences will create the brand loyalty that matters while creating a culture of trust, communication and transparency.
And finally, there is a lot discussion about the "new normal" in the travel industry. It's going to be very different from what we've been used to, so what are the traps that brands might fall into if they continue to think in the old way?
There are three traps that travel and hospitality brands may fall into as they move into the "new normal" of travel.
The first is traveler loyalty. With low demand and excess supply, brands need to make a more concerted effort to build traveler loyalty. You can no longer count on the status of a traveler dictating where a traveler chooses to stay. You must take the extra steps to build loyalty.
Brands can do this by being transparent in their policies and safety procedures as well as listening and responding to traveler needs in a timely fashion. Brands will need to rethink and adjust loyalty programs, innovating and being flexible on what the "new traveler loyalty" might look like.
The second trap is assuming that the volume of corporate travel will remain the same in a post-COVID-19 world. With more companies allowing employees to work from home, and more customer meetings taking place over the web, companies are realizing they don't have to travel for business as much as they thought.
Is it worth taking a day trip, then hopping on the red-eye back home, if it means having to quarantine for 14 days? Probably not. These are the types of questions travel and hospitality brands now have to answer. If they can't provide outstanding experiences, corporate travel as we know it will change dramatically.
And the final trap is that the industry will go back to business as usual. Travel and hospitality brands are going to have to innovate and get creative on how they engage the traveler, and what travel experiences will look like moving forward.
For example, I'm sure we've all heard the anecdote about the dirtiest item in the hotel room being the remote control, but that takes on a whole different meaning now. How will brands innovate and redesign the room experience moving forward? Will everything be voice controlled, or connected through an app on your phone? How will the hotel lounge experience, or breakfast buffets change? What about the fitness centers?
The brands that will come out of this stronger, and become industry leaders, will be ones that can innovate transparently, and can personalize the experience based on individual traveler expectations.
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