Stewart Travel Management, part of Brooklyn Travel Group, is a corporate travel management company based in Glasgow with 43 employees, including senior management, sales, reservations and administration teams. Its clients, mainly SMEs, cover a range of sectors. The majority of enquiries from its clients come via email.
Challenges
After using Outlook for many years, the company wanted to find a new email management system to improve the way customer enquiries were shared out among its reservations team and to improve response times.
Its reservations team was split into three sub-teams, each one looking after the needs of specific clients. When customer enquiries came into Outlook, they were routed to go into one of the three inboxes according to which team had been allocated to them.
“With Outlook, there was no real visibility of how many emails were coming in over a month unless we counted them manually,” explains Claire Bonner, who heads up the reservations team.
“There was no way of measuring or reporting on response times until the email was actioned. Emails were coming in thick and fast, and we were relying on the team to pick them up, decide which were urgent, and then act on them.
"It could lead to a culture of cherry picking, which creates an imbalance. It meant that those who were less confident would only pick the simpler enquiries, and were perhaps not gaining the experience and knowledge to progress in their roles.”
Stewart Travel Management found an email management system which promised to address some of these issues, but once it went live, the travel management company (TMC) discovered numerous flaws. “After a stressful few weeks we stopped using it and then took our time to find a better one,” says Bonner. “That’s when we started talking to Front.”
Solutions
“It was about six months from the first conversation with Front until we went live, and implementation was really straightforward,” Bonner explains.
“We had a dedicated implementation manager throughout the whole process. Front had worked with other TMCs before, which helped. The training was brilliant — really clear and concise. After going live, I was expecting a wave of queries from the team, but everyone loved it from the get-go. It was so much easier to use than the system we had tried before.
[Front’s] learning curve is low, and we soon discovered that it does all the functions we needed that Outlook couldn’t do.
Results
A year on, Bonner has seen numerous benefits from using Front — for her reservations team, for herself as Reservations Manager, for the business — and for the TMC’s corporate clients.
“Now our team is split into six sub-teams and our inboxes work on a load-balancing function, not a round robin,” explains Bonner. “Emails are routed to the correct team, and the workload is evenly distributed by assessing how many emails they’ve been assigned. It means the team can be more organised and isn’t overloaded with too many emails.
“It has stopped any cherry picking. Those who used to avoid handling more complex enquiries are now learning how to work through them. It’s been a great training tool.”
A snooze function allows consultants to file away enquiries that don’t need an immediate response and set a time to revisit. Another feature, Front AI Compose, helps agents draft replies to enquiries, enabling them to choose replies which are formal, more friendly, or empathetic depending on the nature of the email and the relationship with the client. Front’s shared inbox workspace increases visibility for managers, and shared drafts make it easy for Bonner to help out with any responses.
[Front] has given our agents more confidence in their responses and has nurtured closer relationships with customers.
“For me, it’s been invaluable. It allows me to manage productivity as I can just pull up reports with a click and see response times for each team or team member.
“It’s very user-friendly and I can easily filter by each client or team member, type of email, or subject line."
Thanks to the data Front provides, Bonner can see that the TMC’s average response time is now 39 minutes, significantly below the maximum target response time of 1 hour and 30 minutes that is stipulated in client contracts.
“The data we can get from Front has been very useful in RFPs as our sales teams can share our average response times with prospective clients,” she says. Sharing these reports with existing customers also helps them understand the booking behaviours of their travellers.
On the rare occasion of a delayed response, Front allows agents to set alerts to help the reservations team monitor progress and prioritise responses.
The team operates from 7 am until midnight, and Front’s efficient internal communications system makes shift handoff seamless.
“There’s been so much positive feedback,” says Bonner. “When I do my monthly reviews, the teams are much happier, which helps provide better customer service for our clients. It’s a win-win.”
This article was originally published by The Business Travel Magazine: https://thebusinesstravelmag.com/smooth-operation/