In 2006, the global travel industry was experiencing significant growth. With the industry growing at over 5 percent per annum, managing growth while reducing operational costs was an imperative for the travel industry.

At the same time, Travelocity, one of the ten largest providers of internet-enabled consumer-direct travel services worldwide, was undergoing a metamorphosis. Once considered merely a tool to book a flight, Travelocity was transforming itself into an all-encompassing resource for great travel experiences backed by 24/7 customer care.

The company's challenge was managing its sales operations more efficiently in a growth environment in order to increase revenues. With Travelocity's customer promise of delivering a great travel experience, it was necessary to enhance the efficiency of inbound offline sales processes. In a nutshell, improving the productivity of its US contact center to manage the increasing volumes of customer inquiries was critical to achieve growth.

Travelocity chose to partner with WNS not only to reduce operational costs, but also to improve its process efficiencies and enhance the effectiveness of its contact center.

The WNS Solution

Since piloting a project to manage airline ticket sales in 2006, the Travelocity team at WNS has greatly expanded the scope of its solution to include offline sales of travel insurance, car and hotel bookings for multiple business lines powered by Travelocity.

Key features of the WNS solution

• Re-engineering sales processes at the contact center to maximize team productivity

• Leveraging the Travelocity sales training modules to create a compelling, relevant and customized training program for the WNS team thereby enhancing productivity

• Improving process efficiencies to enable the team to up-sell and cross-sell affiliate products

• Implementing LEAN Six Sigma programs to reduce average handling time (AHT) of inbound calls

• Creating a customized MIS tracker for accurate tracking and analysis of performance.

Extending Your Enterprise

The Travelocity team at WNS extended Travelocity's enterprise by significantly reducing its operational costs, delivering process efficiencies in order to handle larger volumes of customer inquiries, and increasing sales by enhancing conversion rates. Importantly, Travelocity was also able to leverage insights gleaned from the data collated by their WNS team to fine-tune the offerings of its affiliates, thereby increasing revenue.

Benefits delivered by the WNS team

• Reduction in operational costs by approximately 40 percent year on year

• Reduction in average handling time (AHT) by almost 20 percent thereby enabling the same team to handle a larger volume of customer inquiries

• Increase in call volumes being handled per agent by over 76 percent since the start of the relationship

• Increase in the sale conversion rate by approximately 50 percent resulting in additional revenues.