Hotels.com, the world’s most visited hotel booking site*, uses Eptica to manage online enquiries in 9 languages and drive operational efficiency.
Hotel.com uses five outsourced multi-lingual contact centres, in different country locations, serving 32 points of sale. Hotel.com’s websites handle millions of accommodation searches every year. Every inbound enquiry is a potential sale, or a booking question, that needs to be handled accurately and fast.
A robust solution was needed to manage inbound enquiries in multiple languages, with the capability to easily add more as hotel.com expands. The ability to have global visibility of the distribution, resourcing and management of all enquiries is essential.
Hotels.com uses different outsourced contact centre operations located in Spain, Bangalore, Sweden, Ireland and Germany. The combination of multi-lingual agents available to handle incoming enquiries at each contact centre varies at any one time. It’s a challenge to monitor email volume, know how much resource is being utilised and how effectively agents are responding.
Using Eptica, online enquiries are now automatically routed from the various hotel.com sites to the most appropriate agent, according to their language, expertise, availability, and also the email address and content of the request. Agents are automatically provided with a detailed client history, enabling them to see a complete picture of any interactions the customer has already had with hotels.com.
The system uses a single knowledgebase, shared by all five contact centres, which holds customer service information and templates for email replies in nine languages. Eptica’s multilingual semantic processing engine is able to: automatically analyse the content of an inbound message; know the language; understand the message; and route it to an agent with the appropriate language skills, along with the recommended best answer from the knowledgebase in the corresponding language. The system has led to significantly improved transaction times and more efficient utilisation of agent resources.
Agents can tailor email templates in order to send personalised responses. Every interaction improves the quality and relevance of the knowledgebase, enabling all agents to provide consistent service, regardless of location and language. From one system, Hotels.com is able to monitor the quality of service delivered by all the contact centres and yield an invaluable source of insight about customer issues and requirements.
Having a detailed view of email volumes and what enquiries are about, enables Hotels.com to quickly identify and rectify issues created by their own operations, such as changes to web sites, which drive up customer interactions.
Visibility of average handling times, resolution rates and agent workload is provided through Eptica reporting, allowing Hotels.com to monitor performance and set KPIs accordingly. Reuben Goldsmith, call centre operations director at Hotels.com explains: “We can now track performance in real-time and create improvement plans to ensure we meet first contact resolution standards.”
The Eptica system is able to handle enquiries in 20 languages, from standard European languages to Thai and Vietnamese, and provides plenty of scope for hotels.com to expand into new regions. Reuben Goldsmith adds: “The Eptica system has been specifically tailored to the needs of Hotels.com and presents a scalable solution to grow with our business. It will ensure that we continue to deliver high quality customer service to the enquiries we receive.”
*Hotels.com website is the most visited in the ‘Hotels/Accommodation provider’ category, according to comScore Media Metrix.
