Travel and Tourism Customer Lifecycle Solutions Help Achieve and Retain Long-Term Profitability

Due to the emergence of low-cost providers and other competitive pressures, today’s travel and tourism companies face declining margins and waning customer loyalty. To survive and excel in this marketplace, airlines, tour operators and hotel chains must find ways to maintain the caliber of service their customers expect, while keeping operating costs under control.

In the Philippines, the property sector is poised to book record growth across all segments this year, particularly continued growth of the business process outsourcing and tourism sectors. Business process outsourcing in particular contributes to the growth as more residential developments are built near office buildings in addition to outsourcing centers themselves to cater to the growing number of business process outsourcing workers in the country. The country is also building up in anticipation of the influx of tourists.

Alorica, a provider of business process outsourcing solutions, is an experienced partner in the travel and tourism industry, with more than five years of experience servicing the travel and tourism industry in the Philippines backed by a world-class staff and a cutting-edge technology infrastructure.

“From my experience, most clients are most interested in, or the main attraction is non-voice, or a company’s ability to manage online transactions coupled by IVR solutions that push customers to a client’s Web portal,” explained Malu Mercado (News - Alert), general manager for the Philippines, Alorica.

The second driver for travel and tourism organizations turning to outsourcing is risk management solutions. Alorica’s back office solutions help manage risk through improved consistency and accuracy, as well as increase operational efficiency, focus on core business activities and control overhead costs.

Alorica empowers organizations to provide responsive service, swift dispute resolution and the convenient self-service options travel customers demand. Across multiple touch points, Alorica turns customer interactions into valuable lifetime connections, helping to create customers for life.

It provides cost-effective solutions and high level of quality to its clients’ customer base. The business process outsourcing provider currently serves customer transactions related to flight reservations, ticketing, rentals, loyalty program management, shipping and tracking and agent-assist trip planning calls. Other clients include air, train and cruise line carriers, hotels, car rentals and couriers.

It decreased a major U.S. airline’s contact center costs by more than 40 percent with its offshore strategy, while also achieving a 67 percent reduction in e-mail response time from 72 to 24 hours. Alorica also customized a CRM system to capture and analyze customer data, which was formally a manual process for the airline. The analytics extended beyond the call center operations to include revenue source details for the airline’s top management business strategy needs.

The travel and tourism vertical in the Philippines is headed by directors with strong backgrounds in business transformation.

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“With this industry’s expectation for lower pricing rate, technology and back-office solutions, or what we call blended service, are good leverage to deliver value added service to our clients. We have the ability to design and offer a custom-built solution per client, allowing us to offer and maintain cost-effective solutions,” said Mercado. “Also, a blended service delivery model addresses our client’s challenge to maintain several vendors. Most clients would have a separate contract for customer service, sales and back-office as our competitors lack the expertise to operate in all service delivery models.”

Alorica’s clients benefits from low operating costs without the challenges of dealing directly with full-time equivalents. With this, they gain flexibility and scalability in workforce, which is common in the travel and tourism market. There is ease in addressing requirements for seasonal works.

“Having an outsourced site provides redundancy solution, which is very critical to the travel industry. During workers strike in a domestic site, our clients are assured that their customers are attended to while they stay focused in resolving in-house employee concerns,” said Mercado.

Having an outsourced partner increases operational efficiencies amongst domestic and captive sites near shore and off-shore as these sites would compete to exceed KPIs.

“Outsourcing is a huge industry and we have experts who look into continuous transformation. In order for the industry to be sustainable, we look into customer profile and behaviors in the next decade and anticipate process and technology solutions to address multichannel customer requirements,” said Mercado.

Alorica also provides business process outsourcing solutions for a number of industries, including healthcare, technology, telecommunications, energy and utilities, financial services and consumer products and retail.

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