June 28, 2023

Customer Loyalty Team: Supporting Customers Through Their Booking Experience

Susan Brown

Rocket Travel by Agoda supports our partners not only through technology, data and strategic marketing, but also through a customer loyalty team of more than 300 experienced individuals around the world who are dedicated to supporting customers and their travel booking experience.

Our customer loyalty team is prepared to answer questions, solve problems and get customers to where they are going 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The team is on standby to assist customers with earning points and spending points on our white label platforms as well as our consumer facing platform, Rocketmiles.com.

Listening, learning, and adapting to our customers

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Beautiful Rust - Noel F.
‍WINNER

Sukhothai - Tham W.

A Glimpse into the Past with Grandma - Fernanda R.

Sunrise Moment in Bagan - Justyna S.

The Sound of Vinyl - Bruna R.

Sacre Coeur at Dawn - Rubens J.

Laundry Day - Daniel B.

Old Town - Tim C.

Punch it, Chewy - Wesley T.

Old World (in the new) - Yvonne P.

Braveheart - Trim Castle 1200 BC - Joseph N.

Sesame Street - Hannah H.

We came to this place for magic -
Maure L.

1965 Apollo Test Capsule - Erica A.

I can remember this place - Zainab L.

Retirement post school runs - Sravya M.

Let's Play - Ying Q.

Real Alcazar de Sevilla - Arun V.

Nostalgia gives us perspective and, maybe, objectivity- Valentina O.

Love lights life- Diana F.

From fielding calls and emails from guests and suppliers to looking at customer insights and identifying technical issues, our team can do it all. We spend hundreds of hours listening to calls and coaching our teams to find solutions that maintain a positive customer experience.

Unexpected things happen on trips and sometimes plans change. Our customer loyalty team provides exceptional service by going above and beyond to negotiate and accommodate special needs or requests. If the customer needs to change a hotel stay or needs a special service on their rental car, we work with suppliers directly to help make their travel plans seamless.

We have a team of specialists who are dedicated to protecting our guests and our business from fraud. We are the best in the industry at uncovering fraud schemes, which helps us keep our costs low so we can pass that cost savings on to our customers.

Our team also understands that unexpected things can happen during travel, and customers might express their concerns with others. That’s why our team monitors various social media sites, looking for unsatisfied customers and reaching out to them to help find a resolution that improves their experience.

The goal of our customer loyalty team is to ensure we deliver fast and effective service. We measure how long it takes for us to answer the contact (SLA 80% within 30 seconds), how quickly we get the problem solved (handle time) and how effective we are in solving the problem (quality monitoring). All of this is important for us to continually innovate and find the best solutions to our customers' problems.

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Improved solutions based on insights

As a tech company, part of our team is constantly monitoring technical issues and patterns, to provide solutions and escalate complex issues to the engineering team. Our team is overflowing with data and customer insights that we use to help guide improvements that enhance the user experience on our platforms.

Recently, our team further improved our customer experience by implementing an AI chatbot, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) to assist customers in need of assistance. This new technology is much more than an automated phone tree; it ties deeply with our backend systems and allows the customer to naturally talk to the IVR and complete common updates to their booking, such as canceling their hotel reservation. Customers answer a few questions in the IVR and the chatbot does all of the work in seconds. This innovative new tool allowed us to respond to feedback and learned insights from our customer base, helping improve handle times and increase satisfaction rates with customers.

In-depth consumer journeys drive engagement throughout every phase of the customer lifecycle. A robust suite of transactional emails ensure customers have all the information needed at their fingertips from booking, to check-in, and post-trip. Dynamic cross-sell strategies allow us to drive high attach rates with other travel products offered by our partners, generating incremental bookings and boosting the value of each trip, and abandoned search and welcome series ensures customers understand the value of our partners’ travel platforms and stay loyal to our partners’ brands.

Personalized content leveraged throughout our emails, delivering a unique experience for the consumer. Our personalized email communications ensure each customer has all the information they need throughout their travels, easy ways to contact our customer loyalty team for assistance, and suggest travel destinations based on their personal travel preferences. This adds a level of convenience to the consumer experience and drives engagement with our partners’ brands.

Utilizing AI is quickly becoming a cornerstone of email marketing. Using artificial intelligence allows our marketing teams to quickly drive innovation through A/B experimentation. In testing, we have found it to be very effective at driving results and are developing new ways to leverage this emerging technology as email marketing services continue to expand.

Segmenting audiences based on previous engagement data to deliver new messages to the customer and drive continued engagement with our white label platforms.

Robust reporting enables us to continually optimize the performance of our campaigns, and keep partners informed of success and areas of opportunity at every phase of a partnership.

Enhancing the overall customer experience

Rocket Travel by Agoda partners with some of the largest travel consumer brands in the industry. It’s an honor that our customer loyalty team is entrusted to represent those brands and provide service to our joint customers. We take it very seriously, from understanding what each brand promise entails to matching operating procedures for our customers so they have a seamless brand experience.

The entire customer loyalty team is highly integrated into our business through elevating the voice of the customer, creating flexible contact flows and enhancing our partner’s brand experience.

Does your organization need an enhanced solution for customer loyalty? Connect with us to learn more about how our team can work with you to develop a travel loyalty platform that engages and supports your customers at every stage of the travel planning process.

About the author

Susan Brown is the Vice President of Operations at Rocket Travel by Agoda. She has 30 years of experience leading customer service organizations for some of the largest brands in the world. She holds certifications as a Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) and a Certified Six Sigma Master Black Belt. Outside of work, Susan is a mother of two boys and sits on the Board of Directors for Seed St. Louis, an organization that provides communities with the tools, education, and empowerment to grow their own food.