The making of lighthouse, TravelPerk’s bespoke contact center
It’s common knowledge that Customer Care is central to the TravelPerk experience. We’re constantly hearing stories about last-minute bookings that save marriages. About complex, almost impossible combined tickets that get people home safe and sound against the odds. Even about monkey plush toys as special requests for hotel rooms (yes, that’s a thing here).
It’s so important, even, that we have a dedicated space for this type of storytelling at our End of the Week meetings, where agents are encouraged to delight us with 7 Star Stories that would make the Odyssey look like a children’s book.
But that’s not what this article is about. In this article, I’ll explain how we streamlined our Customer Care tooling into one slick, bespoke, user-friendly contact center.
Let’s start at the beginning.
What was the problem?
Before the need for a custom solution appeared, the Customer Care Team was using a collection of different tools for communications (chats, calls, emails), context (company and user information, contact history), and actions (internal system, external suppliers, etc.)
We got an idea of the diversity of these tools and the average time spent on each one of them by (consentingly) installing tracking software on agents’ computers. We later cross-referenced this finding by shadowing a group of agents during their shifts and noticed that they had to invest a fair amount of time in looking for the missing context to action a request. We now had a documentation problem: information was spread all over these tools, and this wasn’t a 7-star experience for our agents, nor for our end users.
An efficient agent workstation
After assessing all the agent pain points that came up during our research, we started developing the idea of a one-stop-shop workstation that would boost our operational efficiency and enable Customer Care to deliver a 7-star service by:
- Centralizing communications and company/user information
- Allowing us to be in full control of the comms’ routing, tagging, and handover
- Giving us the flexibility to scale by reducing the number of tools and increasing our control over them
Once our vision was clear, the next step was validating a prototype for this new concept. We had to be very lean about it and not overproduce, as there would be many things to test and validate first (both technically and usability-wise).
Our plan was to include new channels in a phased way (chats → calls → callbacks → tickets). And we decided to start with chat, our strongest tool.
Is there life on chat?
How were we supposed to bring this dream workstation to life? Well, we did our research for cloud communication platforms too! But to keep us to the point, I’ll just break it to you: we chose a programmable contact center called Twilio Flex.
One of the main reasons we chose this platform was that it is highly customizable and developer-friendly, but there was a lot of design work to do:
The essentials were there, I’ll give you that. But not only would we have to adapt the built-in components to our Design System, but the technical challenges of diving into a new platform would also mean a huge tech dependency. We couldn’t afford any assumptions and every decision had to serve a very specific purpose.
Lucky for us, our users were right there on the Customer Care Team floor! (This was late 2019, before COVID-19). So we made sure we kept open communication flowing while working on the prototypes, and pushed ourselves to go through our endless lists of questions even when we felt we were being already too annoying (we were — thank you, agents!).
We started testing pretty early prototypes, sometimes just static lo-fi screens. This helped us build a pretty efficient design-test-iterate cycle that soon led us to the day we had our first real live chat with a customer!
How does it work?
Conceptually, it’s really simple. We have incoming and outgoing contacts on the left-hand column. Communications take place in the mid column. We call the column in the far right the “info” or “context” panel because that’s where agents will look for information about the company and the user making the inquiry.
You’ll notice that in the communications column, under the second tab, there’s the Notes section, where agents can add internal notes to make the handover of the task smoother. Upon closing the task, agents are prompted to enter the corresponding tags that will make its monitoring easier for team leads and other stakeholders:
From the customer side, chats can come from the TravelPerk app for iOS and Android (owned by the In-Trips Squad) or from the chat widget in the desktop platform.
Once the interface was ready to scale, it was time to tackle other issues to ensure smooth agent-customer communication. For instance, we realized there was a need for agents to quickly identify which trip customers needed help with. Normally agents would ask for the trip ID or other relevant trip information, so the idea here was to reduce back and forth by anticipating customers’ moves with prequalified chats:
Prequalified chats behave slightly differently from regular chats, as they capture relevant trip information (travel alerts, cancellations…) that will immediately show on the context panel on lighthouse. They can only be triggered from a given trip’s page.
And then, calls followed
Following our vision of having all communication channels in one place, we chose calls as our next target. We started by enabling incoming calls for agents to get used to the new way of handling them in lighthouse. Here we had to provide a way for agents to accept or reject calls coming from the client side, as well as to pause and transfer them to other agents.
Once incoming calls were up and running, we went for outgoing calls. To make that possible, we first had to design a keypad and a phonebook that looked more or less like this:
And we’re already seeing the results! The average response time in chat has improved significantly, and so has the average handling time per request. But, best of all, this also seems to be resonating with our customers. Here are a few of our latest NPS ratings:
💫 (10/10) Super fast response when I contact you in the live chat
⭐️ (10/10) Really fast answer
🌟 (10/10) Your customer service is always astonishing. Good job!
✨ (10/10) Very responsive and efficient support
⚡️ (10/10) Very prompt and courteous service by all agents
🌞 (10/10) Quick booking and confirmations and amazing 24hr support
Regardless of the good results, lighthouse keeps evolving towards our vision of an all-in-one contact center—it’s a living creature, after all. We’re always open to feedback and constantly iterating, adapting to agent and customer needs. We can confidently say this is just the beginning of our omnichannel customer experience.
P.s. Why lighthouse?
I love that you asked! Well, we wanted the branding of our new tool to be an open conversation. Along with the squad product manager and our content designer, we set up a Slack channel to bounce ideas off one another.
We knew right from the beginning that we wanted to involve our Customer Care team, so we started by asking agents very random questions such as: “If there was a magic spell that made miracles happen, what would the words be?”, or “If you had a tool to communicate with aliens, what would it be called?” (disclaimer: we’re not calling our customers aliens).
Once we had enough material, we started playing around with the resulting words and concepts and ended up with a shortlist of 3 options that we put to a public vote — the Customer Care agents, of course!
The winner? You guessed it!
Looking for a new role where your designs will make a real impact on how people travel for work? At TravelPerk, we’re always hiring new talent. Visit our careers page to check out our open roles.
