Thomas Cook Deploys Customer Interaction Center from Advania, Interactive Intelligence

Thomas Cook Northern Europe announced plans to enhance its customer service by implementing a Customer Interaction Center (CIC) from Advania, based on an Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) platform.

Specializing in charter travels and small-scale regular flight schedules, Thomas Cook focuses on businesses involving customers who book their trips straight from different travel agents’ websites. But in most cases, customers want to establish contact with an advisor who can answer questions, advice on activities, and offer alternatives.

This implementation of the CIC was launched in May 2012, and will encompass 200 agents located across the Nordic countries. Thomas Cook strives to deliver optimized meeting experience for all clients who contact its various travel agents.

“Our current solution meant that our travel advisors had to keep all the different interfaces for the different medias such as chat, mail and calling in check. With this new platform, travel advisors get an all-in-one interface for all media, making customer service faster and more effective, as well as giving the customer a better service,” said Tommy Jakobsson, IT-strategist at Thomas Cook Northern Europe.

“Parallell to procurement, we had talks with Gartner (News - Alert) about which all-inclusive system solution we should use and they recommended the Interactive Intelligence CIC platform as the best alternative for our type of organization,” added Jakobsson.

According to officials, CIC is an open standard system and it can connect the Thomas Cook contact center solution with the existing CRM-system. This will optimize customer service always, not just during the point of sale.

In March 2012, Art Schoeller, the principal analyst at Forrester Research and Joe Staples (News - Alert), Interactive Intelligence’s chief marketing officer, named cloud migration the most prominent of 2012’s seven key contact center trends, citing increased flexibility and faster deployment times as crucial influencing factors.

This fact was highlighted at a quarterly Web event called “2012: Key Contact Center Trends and Priorities for the Upcoming Year – How you can be ready.”

Interactive Intelligence is a Platinum sponsor of ITEXPO Austin 2012. To be held Oct. 2-5 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, TX, ITEXPO (News - Alert) is the world’s premier IP communications event. Brandon Rowe,Solutions Marketing Manager, will be a keynote speaker at the event. For more information on IEXPO West 2012 click here.