Can You Reconcile Quality vs. Quantity After a Merger?

When your company has built its reputation on great customer service, what happens when you’re in a merger with a bigger company that has a different focus?

That’s the challenge Martin Gurth, Senior Manager of Customer Experience at Travelocity faced after the company was bought by the larger, volume-focused, Expedia.

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In today’s interview, which was recorded at the recent Digital Customer Experience Strategies Summit (DCX), he discusses how they’ve not only kept the strong customer service focus at Travelocity, but how they are now successfully selling the other parts of the merged organization on the value of great customer experience too.

(To hear other highlights from DCX, visit http://frankreactions.com/85)

Same Owners, Different Brands

Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity are all owned by the same company now. But they had three distinct brands. Expedia was known for its huge scale — lots of properties, lots of listings — and it had a widely known brand name.

Travelocity had a much smaller, but devoted, following. It’s followers had stuck with it because the customer service had always been great. So after the merger, Gurth and his team decided to go back to their roots: great customer service.

Research showed that their customers were on the go when they had a problem that needed Travelocity’s help, and normally reached out via social media. That meant it was crucial to be there with timely, friendly, and fast service at those times.

“The customer needs to love us … not because of a loyalty program … but because in your time of need we are going to be there.” – Martin Gurth, Travelocity

The way to do this, they decided, was to have an entire social support center staffed with “Tier 3” executive-level support. In other words, with the folks you’d only get to at other companies if you really pushed your way through the first and second support levels. The folks with the power to make decisions on whether or not to give you a refund, with direct access to the airlines’ reservation systems, with the ability to call a hotel and speak to the manager instantly.

How To Afford Widespread Tier 3 Customer Service

You can’t put just anybody into a Tier 3 support role. It takes a lot of skill, knowledge and training.

That all costs money. Gurth and his colleagues decided the way to finance it was through:

* Moving the social support center to a lower cost location than the United States.

* Taking brand dollars and shifting them from advertising to customer support.

Moving a contact center offshore can work, but, as many companies have found out, there are language and cultural differences, which can lower customer satisfaction. Travelocity realized, soon after setting up a social support center in the Philippines, that it needed to invest heavily in English grammer education, and in training agents how to show empathy in a way that their customers would welcome.

The agents hired to work in that center had already worked with the company for a couple of years, so they knew the organization and its policies. But they also got six weeks of specialized training,