Imagine, or you may already have the experience, when you are in badly need of a customer service support and you contact your e-commercial service or product provider for assistance, a chatbot replied you then you ask your question what most likely will happen is, the clever chatbot replies you with a list of options that it believes which is similar or same as the question that you asked and, of course, you will find that the list has nothing to do with the issue that you are facing unless you are asking an FAQ. You will change your wording and ask again. Sometimes you get a satisfying answer, sometimes you don’t. When you don’t, you feel tired of sending messages all the way. You may feel anxious about why the service or product seller doesn’t just asign a real customer service representative to make the thing easier. While the customer gets a bad purchasing experience, there is higher possibility that the seller will lose the deal.
I am not an Anti-technologist, but I insist that some work has to be done by a decent human being, especially if you are selling something, for example the travel service, that makes people happy.
The customer service representative is an important outlet of an Online Travel Agency’s brand image. A professional and decent customer service representative represents a professional, amicable and reliable brand image with the way he/ she solves the problems of customers. An indecisive potential customer can be convinced and converted just by a nice and decent voice of the customer service representative who answer the call professionally.
You may be skeptical because the market has seen a flood of investment poured into start ups developing chatbot technology. Industrial thought leaders are boosting the advantages of using a chatbot. I would say that applying a chatbot, as a substitute of your customer service representative, is a compromising between service quality and cost. Obviously, this is not the best option.
Building a customer service center can be costly to any OTA, it can be unbearable to small and medium market players who are tapping into the global market. One of the indispensable prerequisites of an international customer service center is multi lingual talents, at least the team should be a master of English communication skills. Recruiting and maintaining of such a team in many of the non-English spoken countries and areas are very costly.
If you are not a giant similar to Expedia, Agoda or Ctrip, your best choice to start travel ecommerce is building your own website with an ready-and-easy-to-launch booking engine. You must be sure that your core engine supplier gives full and consistent training so that your customer service representatives understand every detail of your systems. Even so there still will be many questions and issues arising with communicating with your partners and suppliers worldwide. Cross-lingual and cultural communication are great challenges of e commerce.
Fortunately, Some booking engine suppliers are aware of these challenges. EasyGDS, for example, offering its partners One-Package-Services. Except for a reliable booking engine, it also covers flights, hotels, tours&activities, travel insurance and ground transportation inventories all over the world with its close partnership with worldwide suppliers. And most important, the company with global headquarter based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, one of the most cultural diversifying countries, offers a 24/7 multi-lingual customers service center within a phone call and email distance. The customer service center is ready to solve any booking related issues from any corner of the globe.
According Mr. Ron Ramanan, CEO of GoQuo, Across of the millions of bookings that we have handled for our partners, we’ve learned that customers with some cultural background such as Chinese, are more accustomed to talk to a real customer service representative when they need help. So we make customer service support one of our core service to our partners beside implementing AI powered chatbots. We make the service available even for partners who subscribe the basic package for free so that our partners don’t need to compromising between service quality and cost.
easyGDS now handles more than 80,000 bookings a day. You can always call its customer service center whenever you have any issue about the booking engine, supplying chain, payment and ticketing. Your service call will be attended immediately.
