Flight Centre is hoping to cut the average handling time of customer inquiries in half by putting relevant data in front of customer service agents in a single cloud-based platform.
Flight Centre’s Dianna Ferrara (centre) speaks at Dreamforce 2024.
Salesforce platform owner in Flight Centre’s ‘Global Supply’ business Dianna Ferrara told Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2024 conference last month that the travel company is adopting Data Cloud as the technology foundation for its ‘single source of truth’.
Flight Centre Global Supply is home to the group’s internal procurement and shared services functions, among others.
Data Cloud adoption was a key theme at this year’s Dreamforce event, and Flight Centre indicated it has big plans for the platform.
It is pitched as a way to create a unified view of enterprise data that can help agents provide customer service and be used as the basis of personalisation and AI initiatives.
“Our data was scattered across many different platforms, and due to this, our customer service team’s average handle time is 28 minutes,” Ferrara said.
“We believe that with Data Cloud we can reduce this.
“Also, we knew that if we can bring the data in-house, centralised into our CRM, we would be able to streamline our processes amongst the distribution, procurement and the customer service teams as well, therefore creating and increasing efficiencies and productivity.”
Ferrara said that Data Cloud has been tested with a pilot group of agents, who have helped to champion the cause internally for the technology to be rolled out.
Ferrara added that the “projected impact and return-on-investment” for Data Cloud is “to reduce the customer service team’s workload by 50 percent, meaning that they will be able to handle double the amount of inquiries in the same amount of time.”
The company also hopes to be able to deflect more customer service inquiries to self-service, and to streamline its support systems and processes.
Serving multinational travel buyers
Separately at Dreamforce, Flight Centre Travel Group’s US-based chief technology officer Roy Goldschmitt outlined the company’s use of Salesforce’s Service Cloud to better service multinational customers’ corporate travel needs.
“We’re now contracting the big multinationals and that put us in a position where we had to rethink our operating model,” Goldschmitt said.
“We take a lot of pride in the localised service we deliver. We’re not operating out of a handful of customer service centres; we have customer proximity and a lot of customer intimacy.
“But if you then start working with big multinationals who expect a degree of consistency across all the markets that they’re operating in, it changes [things].
“For us, this meant that we had to basically build a more globalised operating model and move away from a technology stack that was probably a bit fragmented with 20 or 25-plus inquiry management solutions across different markets into one global solution, and we’ve decided this to be Service Cloud.”
Goldschmitt said that having a global instance of Service Cloud meant being able to serve the employees of multinational customers “no matter what region they are travelling” in.
“When they reach out to us, we have a ‘single pane of glass’ kind of approach that allows us to serve them properly, and we’ve seen very positive reactions to this,” he said.
“There’s a level of consistency now, something the customer can feel.”
Goldschmitt added that it also made the jobs of its service agents easier.
“For them, we’re looking at making their ways of working better,” he said.
“If they’re happy, they will make our customers happy.”
Ry Crozier attended Dreamforce 2024 in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.