Case Study: Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group Personalises Its Customer Service

The Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group has a number of contact centres across the globe, in the US, Philippines, India, China and Ireland.

Across each of their contact centres, Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group wanted to offer their customers outstanding, personalised customer service by:

• Offering more service channels
• Replacing an outdated Avaya system
• Improving routing of calls to available agents across multiple locations

Let’s find out how they were able to do so.

About Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group

At Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group – owner of the Radisson Blue, Radisson Country Inn Suites, and Quorvus brands – their focus is on reinventing customer service.

As John Zurn, Senior Director of Reservations and Customer Care, explains: “We differentiate ourselves in the highly competitive hospitality sector by how we handle our guests. We wanted to give them a personalised experience, but we needed a contact centre platform that allowed us to do that.”

Carlson’s 250 agents are based in five contact centres around the world. They handle all guest contacts related to reservations, Carlson’s loyalty programme, and customer resolution issues.

The Challenge

In order to offer outstanding customer care, Carlson wanted to support a variety of channels, but their old Avaya system was too segregated and lacked flexibility.

Zurn explains, “NICE inContact’s omnichannel functionality is a massive improvement for being more intimate with our guests. Now we can serve our customers across all of our channels – it’s the secret sauce in our guest experience.”

“If a guest switches channels, such as using email and then they call us, NICE inContact’s omnichannel functionality ensures that we don’t have to start from scratch in getting their details again. That helps build customer trust and engagement.”

The Solution

Zurn summarises his team’s function as being problem solvers. He says: “When customers call us, they’re looking for a competent resolution, such as needing a reservation in a specific city at a particular price, an online password reset, or perhaps they’re reporting an issue with a hotel.”

In order to truly offer their customers outstanding, personalised customer service, Zurn knew that Carlson needed a new contact centre platform, because their outdated Avaya system of premises-based phone switches lacked flexibility and was difficult to customise.

Carlson chose the NICE inContact CXone Cloud Contact Center Platform for its omnichannel functionality, ease of use, and ability to quickly switch callers to the next available agent – regardless of where the agent is based.

The Results

The Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group saw a number of great results after deploying the NICE inContact solution. Let’s have a look at some of them.

Reducing Abandonment by 30%

With their new ability to automatically distribute contacts among their global call centres, Carlson has seen a big drop in abandonment rates. Their old Avaya system lacked that capability, which meant guests tired of waiting for an agent and hung up.

Zurn explains, “Since we implemented NICE inContact, abandonment has dropped by more than 30%. Why? Because our customers are no longer waiting on hold.”

“NICE inContact moves the guest to the next available agent, or if they prefer, guests can choose to have us call them back when the next agent is free. Just offering that choice reduces frustration,
because the worst thing in the world is for a guest to feel like they don’t have a choice.”

Ensuring Business Continuity

“One of the things we never had before NICE inContact was a business continuity plan. We have it now, and it’s extremely comforting to know we always have phone, chat, or email available when it’s needed,” continues Zurn.

When inclement weather or natural disasters occur, the NICE inContact platform automatically distributes Carlson’s contacts among their global call centres.

“In Omaha, snowstorms can cut down our call centre resources instantaneously. It’s not an issue, though, because our other two centres can pick up that volume.”

Likewise, in Manila, hurricanes can cause service interruptions. If that site is down, we’ll pick up their calls in Omaha. With NICE inContact, we can service our guests anywhere in the world 24/7.”

Reporting Offers New Level of Visibility

By using NICE inContact to report on key KPIs and metrics, Carlson Hotels has a new level of visibility into their business, including service levels, agent performance, and abandonment.They also use customisable dashboards for real-time insight into performance.

“We now have the ability to see every single channel, service level, and calling queue in one screen. Imagine what that’s allowing us to do as we integrate those individual channels and look at it all holistically,” says Zurn.

Realising the Advantages of the Cloud and SaaS

When asked about the advantages of using a cloud-based contact centre platform, Zurn enthusiastically ticked off the benefits.

“One of the big advantages is the ACD can distribute calls to the next available agent regardless of where they’re based.”

“We also like the flexibility of SaaS, because we can use NICE inContact at the rate that we want. It ensures new product releases are occurring on a predictable schedule, and we no longer have to absorb the responsibility or costs to support switches. That means we can spend our time on what we’re really good at which is putting people in hotel rooms.”

The Recommendation

Zurn’s advice to other contact centres that are struggling with inflexible systems, lack of a business continuity plan, or the inability to scale is to look into NICE inContact.

“Working with NICE inContact has been a real joy. I’ve done several software installations, and they can be tough. Our installation was remarkably easy in the scope of big software implementations. This was the best one I’ve ever done. The next day NICE inContact delivered the value we wanted.”

This post has been re-published by kind permission of NICE inContact – View the original post