Taking flight for the holidays: Helping customers with check-in, cancelations, and more.

Perhaps the sector most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic was travel, particularly airlines. However, a study by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics shows that people’s desire to travel is reignited – from January of last year to September (the holiday season), Americans took 543.1 million trips that were between 50 to 500 miles, an 24% increase despite overall trips being down by 5 billion. As of September 9, 2021, observers concluded that Americans grew accustomed to working from anywhere, which has allowed many to travel more freely and flexibly. 

Nevertheless, an even more significant change in behavior since the pandemic is that Americans no longer book holiday flights weeks or months in advance. Instead, they are booking last-minute. This behavior change is largely the result of the more volatile nature of travel due to restrictions and sudden cancellations. The flight-tracking site flightaware.com noticed that 25% of all domestic, commercial airlines flights since June of 2021 were either delayed or canceled. In August, Spirit canceled 60% of its flights per day – with Southwest and American experiencing similar problems.  

With holiday flights more chaotic than ever, it’s paramount that the travel industry helps customers navigate check-in times and advise them of delayed or canceled flights using systems such as IntelePeer’s SmartFlows. 

We are in the era of the consumer. If one person has a bad customer experience with their flight, their negative review could mean that hundreds of others will skip your business for another. Ensuring timely and reliable notifications is vital for maintaining an exceptional customer experience. With SmartFlows’ drag and drop workflow builder features, you can quickly implement and adjust communication strategies with ease. It doesn’t take a coding expert to use SmartFlows, as it comes with everything from pre-built templates and quick start tips to award-winning support and how-to videos. Plus, there are even industry and use case-specific templates to kick-start the flow-building process. 

IntelePeer’s SmartFlows also takes the strain off your agents with its automated processes, such as sending flight updates and reminders. Allowing customers to solve their own queries with self-service options will safeguard your business for even the most hectic flying days of the holiday season. Additionally, SmartFlows allows for escalating customers to live agents based on their incoming area code, the time of day, day of the week, and percentage of calls so that no call center gets overloaded.

SmartFlows easily ingrates to optimize your customer journey  

IntelePeer’s solution seamlessly integrates other third-party services with your existing infrastructure, whether it’s your CRM, database, billing system, or any other system that supports APIs. Integrate social media such as WhatsApp and Facebook and other services like IBM Watson, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud. IntelePeer offers how-to videos for integrating with Mailchimp, Zendesk and Salesforce and our pre-built templates spark immediate solutions.

SmartFlows also comes equipped with natural langue processing and built-in speech recognition, enabling customers to express input verbally. From there, you can measure sentiment and even the tonality of text interactions allowing for more helpful and meaningful responses. All these recordings can be stored and managed for employee training purposes and further customer experience improvement. 

This holiday season will experience a notable influx of eager travelers hoping to see friends and family they haven’t seen in over a year. SmartFlows will not only assist customer service across communication channels, but it can also empower your IT, finance and marketing departments to be at their top performance for the most important holiday season in years.