Varolii IDs Transportation Challenges, Helps Southwest Meet Them

Few industries pose as many challenges to enabling high quality customer-retaining interactions as transportation. Few others are as subject to daily, weekly and seasonal peaks and slumps, with passengers and organizations traveling and shipping en masse or not at all. Or to as many variables that impact successful delivery: corporate decisions, labor disputes, equipment malfunctions, fuel/energy prices and availability, weather, disasters: man-made and natural and the customers themselves. Yet few businesses have customers that are as demanding.

In the middle between customers and transportation firms are the contact centers. Their agents must with smiles in their voices and fingertips meet customers’ needs, including placating them to keep their loyalty.

Robin Rees, director of Customer Programs, Varolii and a Boeing (News - Alert) and travel industry veteran points out that change in transportation often come very fast, and unexpectedly. When bad weather hits and flights are delayed or cancelled, it not only impacts travelers in storm areas, but also those who are scheduled on later flights on the same airplane or with the same crew. If the crew doesn't get to its next assignment, the airline has to scramble to find another that's willing, able and certified to fly. 

For freight shippers, the problems can be just as bad, says Rees.  While packages do not complain about delays, the consumers waiting for them do, especially for time-sensitive delivery dates such as holidays.  The problem is compounded when each day’s shipments get backed up.  The volume increases, but the available vehicles usually do not. A package shipped a few days after a major weather delay may still be late because the shipper is still trying to catch up, a situation which the recipient doesn't always understand.

Also consumers can be hard to reach, which exacerbates problems. An airline traveler notified of a gate change too late isn't going to be happy when they finally get to the new gate just as the airplane has shut its doors. If someone is anxiously awaiting a shipment, they don'’ want to miss the message telling them when to be at home to sign for it.

Transportation providers have websites and information numbers, and airports, stations and terminals have PA systems and message boards. Yet these rely on customers to be in contact, to contact them, be in earshot—often difficult in busy and noisy terminals not built for acoustics—and in sight to deliver key information. The public-facing systems cannot easily have their material personalized—and which may be of confidential nature--to individual customers.

“Companies must contend customer service issues on top of the logistical ones,” says Rees. “Consumers are flooding contact centers, demanding to know their own personal status and are often not in the mood to be placated.  Minutes count.  If companies can communicate quickly to large numbers of their customers, they tend to avoid - or at least lessen - the consumer backlash.”

Varolii has devised and refined automated outbound voice and e-mail/SMS customer service and flight team notification solutions. These tools avoid having live agents make outbound calls and contacts and rely on inbound methods that also add to costs deliver vital messages.

For example, Varolii Customer Service & Loyalty communicates across multiple channels to ensure that travelers are contacted immediately when something changes, even if they're already in transit and don't answer their home phones.  Varolii automatically calls or text messages the status change, outlines new travel arrangements and then offers to connect the traveler to an agent if the new booking isn't acceptable.  If it is, Varolii can then offer to send the new confirmation code via test so the passenger doesn't have to try to write it down while in transit.
 

Since 2007 Southwest Airlines has been using Varolii’s outbound notification system for flight cancellation, and more recently for delay and gate changes, in SMS as well as voice, with personalized messages. The cancellation alerts briefly explains the accommodations being offered, and provides options to transfer to a service agent, or forward the message to another phone number.

The airline had been broadcasting flight cancellation alerts over airport PA systems, at the reservations desks and on their Website. The company also had no way of reaching all of their customers in a timely manner using manual outbound dialing. These events usually created a spike in customer service requests as contact center agents scrambled to handle the flood of inbound calls, while airport desk agents struggled to re-schedule passengers on top of managing passenger check-ins for those unaffected by cancellations.

“The more options we have to proactively reach our customers, over their preferred channel of communications, the better we can serve them and rise above their service level expectations,” said Fred Taylor, Southwest’s Senior Manager of Proactive Customer Communications.