Why Omnichannel Airline Contact Center Solutions should be on Your Radar
Making travel plans has never been easier. What once required a scheduled appointment with a certified travel agent can now be accomplished in mere minutes online from the palm of your hand. As it turns out, this is both a blessing and a curse for support agents, and airline contact center solutions must change in order to keep up.
On one hand, customers are able to accomplish so much more without needing to be walked through the entire process. On the other hand, customers expect that same ease and flexibility when reaching out for support, using whichever platform they choose.
How can airlines meet these rising expectations? The answer is an omnichannel contact center.
Omnichannel Airline Contact Center Solutions
If your customers are able to book flights through multiple channels, it only makes sense that they'd be able to use those same channels for support. After all, nothing is more frustrating than digging for a support number and losing your booking information in the process.
With a traditional contact center, customers are often limited to a single channel based on available resources and technology. This leads many organizations to funnel most inquiries through the same channel, ultimately resulting in frustrated customers.
With an omnichannel contact center, there are no such limitations. The result is a flexible communication platform that allows users to both initiate and receive communication from the same channel through which they're booking a flight, changing an itinerary, or looking for lost luggage.
There's no need to feel trapped within the chosen channel either. After all, some aspects of support are difficult to convey in only one medium. Within an omnichannel environment, you'll be able to seamlessly transition voice calls to chat, chat to email, or any other combination the interaction requires.
The way in which travelers interact with airlines has never been the same since the internet was born. The same can be said about mobile devices as they've found their way into everyone's lives. Isn't it time your contact center solution was modern enough to take advantage of this online world?
Omnipresent Management
Omnichannel airline contact center solutions give your team more ways to support your customers, but they can also help you support your team.
The benefits of an omnichannel contact center — such as the ability to abstract the form of communication from the actual communicating — come from its cloud-based nature. Whereas traditional contact centers that claim to support multiple channels can come with a challenging integration strategy, omnichannel platforms are built from the ground up with a communication layer that's almost completely unattached to the hardware.
The result is a centralized, cloud-based framework from which you can easily scale, monitor, and support your team in real time. Listen in on calls with new agents or particularly tricky customers. Seamlessly transition calls, emails, or chat between agents to match the right expertise with the right case. You can even switch channels on the fly as needed.
With a cloud foundation, all calls, emails, and chats are automatically logged and fed into a real-time analytics and reporting dashboard. This helps you maximize your resources as you allocate agents accordingly. Better yet, you can leverage historical analytics to identify seasonal staffing requirements.
Flexing the Cloud
One particularly limiting factor of many airline contact center solutions is directly tied to the limited technology on which they rely. Agents are tethered to the phones and voice network in the office. Once outside those four walls, agents have zero ability to handle any communications.
Not so with a cloud-based omnichannel contact center. That same cloud backbone that supports communication across multiple channels frees your agents from the tether of traditional telephony. Anywhere with access to a high-speed internet connection instantly becomes an extension of your contact center.
In practice this means you're no longer bound by the specific times each agent can make it into the office. If they've got a computer or smartphone and a connection to the internet, they can field contacts across all of your channels, wherever they may be.
Flexibility in working location doesn't mark the end to the benefits of a cloud-based omnichannel solution, either. With the help of top-of-the-line technology like SmartWAN and a multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) network, you'll be able to offer unmatched quality of service (QoS) to all customers, regardless of the channel they decide to utilize.
The way in which travelers interact with airlines has never been the same since the internet was born. The same can be said about mobile devices as they've found their way into everyone's lives. Isn't it time your contact center solution was modern enough to take advantage of this online world?
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