ALTOUR is one of the largest travel management companies in the world. Their 1,600+ travel professionals across the globe provide management services for corporate, luxury, and entertainment travel. Teams across ALTOUR, including client-facing teams, accounting, operations, and IT, use Front to get a handle on high email volume and deliver exceptional client service.
Challenge
Before using Front, ALTOUR’s client-facing teams used Outlook and created forwarding email addresses to get client emails into the right hands. It was tough to tell which requests had been answered already, so their team sometimes sent duplicate replies. This wasted their team’s time and made for a confusing client experience. They had little insight into email analytics like response time, or their email volume and cadence with specific clients.
Solution
ALTOUR chose Front to make it easier to manage email more efficiently and give clients a seamless experience. Their client-facing teams use Front’s shared inboxes to manage client emails. Teams work on a queue of client emails together. They can easily access client conversations to help out with a reply, or take over when a team member is on vacation.
Faster responses set their team apart
Fast response time is a critical differentiator for ALTOUR over their competitors, especially for clients in the entertainment industry. They typically keep a 1-hour response time for client emails — but some departments reply in 10 minutes or less on average.
Being able to measure SLA has been one of the biggest benefits of Front for us.
Rules in Front automatically alert them to respond when they’re approaching an SLA. “Being able to measure SLA has been one of the biggest benefits of Front for us,” said David Sefton, SVP of Operations for West Coast Operations. “Now we can demonstrate our response time to prospective clients to instill confidence in us and seal the deal.”
Personal and thorough responses for a better client experience
Since ALTOUR agents get similar questions from clients repeatedly, they saved more than 300 email responses in Front. They can easily search and edit these message templates to send thorough replies much faster. “Message templates are a big time saver for us,” Sefton said. They use message templates to send FAQs for new clients, send itinerary options, and automatically follow up with booking numbers, thank you messages, and more.
Easy collaboration and context makes happier employees
Front creates a happier and more collaborative environment for the ALTOUR team. “Now that we use Front, collaboration exists where there wasn’t before,” said Sefton. They can see what’s being worked on by teammates at a glance. If someone knows a good solution to a client question, they can easily leave an internal-only comment or start a email draft in Front to help each other out. “Front makes it easy for agents to get help and improve their skills, even if they’re not comfortable asking for it,” Sefton said.
Now that we use Front, collaboration exists where there wasn’t before.
Better visibility for managers
“Front allows our managers to do their jobs better,” Sefton said. “With Front’s shared inboxes, you can get a birds-eye view of what your team is working on at a glance, rather than having to dive into the weeds to get an understanding of what’s going on." They use Front’s Analytics to access team, individual, and customer metrics and make decisions on how they can improve.
