Many companies want to become “the Ritz-Carlton of banking” rather than “the Wachovia of Hotels.” The hospitality industry resonates with a broad opportunity to win their customers’ hearts through exceptional customer support. The travel and hospitality industry is very vast in terms of size and nature. This implies a large number of customers in this industry, be it the hotel or tourism industry. With each passing year, you can witness an increasing customer base.
Plus, as the festive season arrives, online reservations for flights and hotels start taking a surge. Stakeholders receive multiple customer queries about booking procedures, room tariffs, meal services, and whatnot. Customers will contact the brands by calling, emailing, or better, through their social media accounts. Hotels, on the other end, end up with flooded client inquiries through multiple channels.
Without a helpdesk system in place, the staff will be busy throughout the peak season. They will constantly have to keep juggling between responding to messages, and emails, and attending calls. This is bad for the employees and your brand, as multiple inquiries may slip through the cracks. In order to keep the working process efficient and effective, stakeholders in the travel and hospitality industry need a helpdesk system. In this article, we will uncover more about this helpdesk for the hospitality and travel industry. We’ll talk about:
#1 Helpdesk For Hospitality: A Brief
#2 Need of Helpdesk For Hospitality
#3 Hospitality Industry Without Helpdesk
#4 Elements of Helpdesk For Hospitality and Travel
Helpdesk For Hospitality: A Brief
The hospitality industry is dynamic and constantly strives to keep up with the customers’ ever-changing demands. In order to meet these demands, hoteliers usually face a variety of issues that need quick and swift resolutions. They need a standardized process to manage everything from an outage affecting online touchpoints to seasonal demand for extra devices and kiosks.
Need of Helpdesk For Hospitality
Customer support in the tourism and hospitality industry is paramount to success. For businesses to thrive, they need to put more and more effort into keeping their clients. And, more importantly, keeping them loyal to their brand. This means that support teams need to develop long-term relationships with each customer. This makes it a bit difficult as it is about more than just making a sale.
Here, you need to take care of the customer’s entire experience, from when they evaluate your services to when they leave positive reviews. Your services need to be so helpful and convenient that it creates a lasting impression on them. For this to happen, your team needs to make all points of contact efficient. Not only that, but they also need to make the entire communication process consistent.
Benefits of Helpdesk For the Hospitality and Travel Industry
Here are some benefits and reasons for why one should use the helpdesk for hospitality and travel.
1. Efficacy During High Demand Season
Getting in contact with people becomes a serious issue for customer-facing staff during peak seasons. This is because the festive season comes with extra responsibilities for the staff in any respective industry. A helpdesk will help you get out of this issue and will help you streamline your customer queries.
Your team may be annoyed with answering repetitive questions again and again. This can be solved through a self-service knowledge base option. You can answer all the presale and post-sale queries through FAQs that you can post on your knowledge base. It is also better to prepare a reply in advance for the same set of questions and then quickly shoot the response from the saved replies when a customer raises a similar question again. This saves the time of the support staff and ensures they don’t send inconsistent replies.
2. Customer Retention Strategy
It is crucial for people from the travel and hospitality industry to have strategies that help them retain their customers and provide services so that the customers keep coming back to you. Delivering exceptional support is the bare minimum and is already a known fact, but besides this, what else?
It would help if you had a helpdesk to maintain a proper record of your customers. You need to have everything from their email id to their contact details in place. This will help you get to know them better. With all the data in place, you can send them personalized responses for their tickets and bookings. You can also send them a newsletter periodically to keep them updated about the new things happening. You can also use this data to offer them discounts, gift vouchers, etc.
3. Multi-Lingual Support
It is evident that customers from multiple geo-locations will contact you. And they indeed will have a language preference. That is why it is better that you add the functionality to your support. Through a helpdesk, you can do this easily. You can assign tickets to the agent who has a good command of that particular language. A helpdesk provides the facility of creating a support center according to the language preference where a person will get answers instantly without the need to call the support staff for assistance.
4. Performance Tracking By Reporting Metrics
Admin can keep track of their agents and their work performance through the helpdesk. The admin can get insights into everything from customer ratings given to the staff, the number of customers they have helped, and the total ticket counts they have encountered.
This way, you can know about the work progress of agents individually and collectively too. DeskXpand is super-suited for this kind of situation which guarantees to offer the best customer support. Check out DeskXpand’s customer support helpdesk.
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Hospitality Industry Without Helpdesk
In an industry where customer experience dominates everything, a service team that does not enforce the industry’s best practices will perpetually fall and eventually extinguish. Hoteliers will be stuck in tracking high-priority incidents and chasing delayed service requests. Insufficient request management will lead to failures in internal services and will end up disrupting the customer experience.
For example, suppose an event hall is booked for a business conference, and the support team issues this detail/notification. In that case, it could lead to low bandwidth allocation and poor internet access during the event. A lack of robust back-end processes could even lead to dire consequences, such as a customer data breach but with the help of an event ticketing system, it can be easily handled.
Hospitality Industry Without Helpdesk
Elements of Helpdesk For Hospitality and Travel
Here are some features or elements that a helpdesk for hospitality must have!
1. Booking Queries
Customers are bound to have queries, whether they are for flight, hotel, bus, or any other booking type. This is where the helpdesk comes into the picture. Through a helpdesk, customers can quickly raise a ticket through the medium of their choice. With a helpdesk, hoteliers can also maintain a proper record of the customers and their data. During peak seasons or peak hours, a helpdesk for hospitality proves to be the ideal choice for businesses. The helpdesk feature caters in multiple ways:
2. Ticket Automation Features
Reduce the time spent assigning the tickets with automatic ticket assignments. Features like automatic ticket import, ticket assignment, and priority management can help you deliver faster responses and solve customer queries accurately. This also ensures that your processes deliver the perfect customer experience.
3. Omnichannel
Customers also need support over channels like email support, self-service support, feedback, and social media (Twitter, Facebook). Helpdesks are packed with omnichannel features that bring together queries from all the channels in one place. It helps frame a seamless process of priority management too. This also gives multiple options and touchpoints to the customers to reach out to you.
4. Contextual Support
If your customers face queries and want an immediate response to their queries pertaining to booking or confirmation, you won’t be able to provide proper support without a helpdesk. A helpdesk brings all the conversations to one screen so that agents also do not feel overwhelmed.
A helpdesk is your one-stop database solution for managing all your prospects and turning them into customers. By integrating helpdesk with your CRM, you can determine when someone raises a support ticket through instant notification.
5. Priority Management
You can figure out the priority of the tickets you receive based on various parameters through a helpdesk. A helpdesk can help you define service level agreements and ensure that your employees follow the set deadlines.
6. Support Agent Interface (Dashboard)
Tracking customer history, previous customer communication, and customer data is challenging for most travel and hospitality businesses. Through the agent interface, support reps can track the overall customer journey. This results in a high ticket handling rate. Helpdesk lets you perform this efficiently. Its multichannel capabilities and advanced process management tools empower businesses to provide the best customer services.
7. Web Admin Panel
Support managers or admin can analyze the overall performance of their employees through the helpdesk. They can do this from the web admin panel. They can evaluate their strategy using these insights to design better customer experiences. By tracking conversation history, customer journeys, etc., brands can deliver personalized real-time support. Later, you can quantify this data to understand customer expectations over various issues from your services.
8. Knowledge Management System
A helpdesk can have an easy-to-build and multilingual knowledge base system in place so that the customers can use it to resolve issues whenever they want. This will also keep the agents focussed on resolving and handling critical customer issues.
9. Declutter and Manage Multiple Departments
Sometimes managing multiple aspects of your hotel can get extremely overwhelming. Each aspect has its own style of working and its own workflows to manage. Having to share common resources might lead to a lot of misunderstandings among your service reps and teams. Through a helpdesk, you can manage multiple departments easily. Through real-time dashboards, you can have a bird’s eye view of your entire support process. Hence you can guide your service reps accordingly.
10. Collaboration Features
Streamline all your internal requests through collaboration! A helpdesk will help you streamline communication between departments and increase your overall efficiency. This will also eliminate breaches in the service level agreements and will reduce the overall resolution time. Features like comments within the tickets, internal chat, private notes, and canned responses can save time and resources for your teams.
DeskXpand Helpdesk For Travel and Hospitality
DeskXpand is a complete package of travel and hospitality solutions. It takes care of all your travel and hospitality support needs. You can personalize it according to your business needs too. It lets you manage available support to ensure that the tickets reach the right agents for the fastest responses.
DeskXpand comes with in-product security features to help you manage your data security challenges. With DeskXpand, we uphold high standards of security, and our practices are robust and regularly maintained. We treat customer privacy as our highest priority. We care about securing your crown jewels (data) and do our best to address your data trust concerns.
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