Background image: Unsplash – Carlos Coronado

For any modern business, the cost of one key employee losing a plane can easily have a ripple effect, leading to the complete loss of a business opportunity. Therefore, A corporate travel agency needs to be able to provide its customers with fast, proactive and reliable aid every day. 

The challenge

As a corporate travel agency situated in a single country – or even on a few continents – this logistic challenge may come with high costs or, unfortunately, with a sub-par service delivered outside regular work hours.

Read this quote from a shipping company executive whose ship captain missed his flight to the next port of exit from where he was scheduled to start his voyage of transporting 100,000 DWT of livestock cargo. He realised his mistake at the check-in counter when the airline staff told him that his flight was for the previous day, as he mistook the date/time for the present day. – “We are dealing with the aftermath of colossal financial loss and reputational setback till this day.”

Since the mishap, the shipping company has engaged a travel management company that provides its travellers with 24/7 travel support services.

Most business travellers would agree that it can be stressful when travel plans suddenly change (we witnessed the frequently changing documentary requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic), delayed flights, or stranded in a foreign country with language barriers and a different culture. When this kind of unexpected situation occurs, the business traveller must have a reliable lifeline to their travel agency.  

For larger global TMCs (Travel Management Companies), achieving 24/7 emergency support is more accessible due to their extensive international travel network of agencies around the world. 

But what about medium and small-sized travel agencies? How do they offer 24/7 emergency support without having the same scale as the global players? 

This challenge has always been a critical concern for corporate travel agencies. Still, with modern interconnectedness, the challenge has grown to hitherto unknown heights. It is one of the most important benchmarks for any travel agency servicing business customers. The approach chosen can either make or break a travel agency, whether newly established or an experienced player.

Your Modern Business Traveller is More Demanding 

Until recently, business travellers would typically require assistance only in exceptional cases, such as a flight diversion or an unexpected hotel cancellation. But in today’s global business landscape and its intercontinental focus, questions that the modern corporate travel agency needs to be able to handle may occur at any hour of any day. Businesses will undoubtedly prefer the agencies that can aid them most consistently, whether they ask at 8 am in Boston, Berlin or Beijing. In many instances of tender bidding, businesses disqualify a travel agency which does not have a 24/7 emergency support capability in place. 

Now, imagine yourself as a stranded business traveller in a foreign country. Emailing your local travel management company will often fall short of the traveller’s expectations. As a travel agency, you might offer fast email response times and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for emails. Still, in challenging situations, the traveller would prefer to speak with their business travel agency over the phone or, even better, through a voice call over WhatsApp. 

A 700-pound gorilla dancing 

How lovely it would be if the traveller could open WhatsApp on their mobile phone and then, with a single click, could make a voice call to their travel agency for emergency support. This would take away a lot of the stress for the traveller: being able to speak with a travel consultant instantly. They would no longer need to search for the travel agency’s phone number or emergency contact information on their mobile phone. 

Making international phone calls means incurring expensive roaming costs, and often, the quality of those calls is inferior. It can add to the traveller’s stress, dealing with poor call quality and an expensive phone bill – a double whammy.

Unfortunately, the reality is that Meta, the owner of WhatsApp, does not offer any 3rd party phone system integration to enable contact centre providers to tap into the WhatsApp voice capabilities. WhatsApp remains the 700-pound friendly gorilla that refuses to dance for anyone but its keepers. It is a shame since most of the business travellers around the globe are using WhatsApp as part of their daily life. 

Are there any alternative ways to eliminate expensive roaming calls and provide travellers with instant access to voice calls to their preferred travel agency? 

Having 24/7 live chat support available on your website could be a consideration. Still, most travellers prefer conversing with their travel agency in chaotic and stressful situations. 

Considering an AI chatbot based on off-the-shelf large language models (LLMs) for emergencies is not an option. Most travellers would be very frustrated with this kind of service, and the company would likely look for another travel agency once the contract period ends. 

Save Costs with just a phone browser and internet with our solution.

A great alternative would be enabling your travellers to make voice calls free of charge over the internet. They don’t need to find a phone number, just a phone browser connected to the internet. With our solution, a URL link or a QR code allows a traveller to connect back to you. You can also include the same link in your email signature or travel itineraries, making it easy for travellers to make instant calls to your emergency line or mainline. This solution can be seamlessly connected to your telephony contact centre system, allowing your travel consultants to handle these calls from their existing phone devices. 

How to Offer 24/7 Emergency Support in 3 Easy Steps Without Breaking the Bank: 

1) Establish a local hotline phone number for 24/7 support. 

2) Find a high-quality and cost-effective cloud-based hybrid telephony solution (such as FocalScope) to assist in handling your 24/7 emergency line. 

3) Connect your worldwide on-premises or hybrid contact centre partners seamlessly to your customers with your upgraded telephony solution.

FocalScope Hybrid Telephony Solution

A travel management company using FocalScope can have support teams using a single shared ticketbox to handle all calls, emails, and social messaging. The shared ticketbox facilitates a seamless handover between teams, ensuring that their customers all over the world can have uninterrupted 24/7 access to quality customer support.

With a single click-to-call link located on their travel itineraries, their customers can reach them to get help for any travel-related support. 

Need a helping hand getting started? 

Whether you are looking to set up a new phone system for handling calls or you need to improve your current setup, FocalScope can help. Our cloud-based phone system can connect agents worldwide into one system, allowing customers to get instant assistance with ease, anytime, anywhere.  

Contact us and discover what we can do for you.