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Using Delacon call tracking data to optimise customer experience

How Flight Centre used a range of partners, including Delacon, to optimise their customer experience

On 25 March 2021, Clinton Hearne from Flight Centre joined Sandra Pigram from Delacon to talk about Customer Experience optimisation. Here’s what we learned from Flight Centre about their challenges and victories in CX for an omnichannel business.

Flight Centre has been around for over 40 years, and is a beloved brand, especially in Australia. Its reach extends to New Zealand, the USA, the UK, Canada, and beyond. Until relatively recently, Flight Centre was operating entirely through a network of high-street store fronts. Taking the next steps, it started its online operations and e-commerce around 8 years ago. Over the years, Flight Centre has sold holidays to over 20 million Australians, but realised it still faced a problem with its customer experience.

Disjointed customer journey

Flight Centre had a customer experience issue; it had no way of connecting its customers’ experiences in one store to their activity online, or even across to a different store. This would mean that returning customers had to start from scratch each time they accessed a new store, or chose to buy online – a frustrating experience for customers who might be spending tens of thousands of dollars with the company over their lifetimes.

Flight Centre knew that it needed to make the customer journey more cohesive, and offer loyal customers an improved experience wherever and however they chose to interact with the brand.

The importance of phone calls

Phone calls are a major touchpoint for Flight Centre – around 80% of measurable enquiry comes through the phone. Flight Centre had limited tracking, no measurement of the customer journey, and it was missing opportunities to convert customers. By adopting Delacon’s Call Tracking solution, Flight Centre was able to understand what its customers wanted, who they needed to talk to, and what they searched and researched before they called. It is now able to track, measure and report the attribution source for all calls from its main website, stores pages, Google My Business listings, and website pages for its independent network of travel consultants.

Attribution is the holy grail; it allows Flight Centre to accurately understand how its marketing activities are performing, and optimise campaigns all the way down to the keyword level. By knowing how its customers interacted with the brand, it could track them through the marketing funnel, across channels, all the way through to the final purchase decision and beyond.

By analysing the keywords that led to calls, Flight Centre was able to lower costs and raise its conversion rate. Understanding what callers wanted allowed it to route callers to the right store, specialist product team, or agent, reducing customer dissatisfaction, and increasing sales. It is currently rolling out a variety of systems that will allow it to personalise each customer’s interaction with the brand, and even enable it to predict the behaviour of customers and be ready to offer the best service. Of course, it’s vital to understand the customer journey across all channels, which is where Call Tracking data becomes essential.

Additionally, this new data allowed Flight Centre to optimise more than just its marketing; by understanding its customers and what they want, Flight Centre can make improvements to its support, product management and operations functions. The data allows Flight Centre to ensure that its products meet the needs of its customers, and that call centres are working efficiently. Taking the data from phone calls, online behaviour and in-store purchases, Flight Centre could ensure that call centre agents are trained in the most relevant products, and that stores promote the most relevant holidays.

The secret to customer experience optimisation? Test, test, test!

Segmentation is vital; by understanding that different customers want different things from a travel agent, engage with different marketing channels, and might occupy more than one segment, Flight Centre can optimise each customer’s experience to ensure that no person feels frustrated, confused, or left behind.

Flight Centre is taking things even further in the name of experimentation: it is now challenging preconceived notions of how its customers behave, and using real-life data to make up-to-the-minute decisions about how customer calls are routed, and how they relate to the overall journey towards purchase. All of this data-driven decision making is only possible with Delacon’s Call Tracking solution in place.

Watch the whole webinar session

If you’d like to learn more about Flight Centre’s continuous customer experience optimisation, and the challenges that they’ve overcome in the last twelve months, you can watch the session here:

This conversation was part of a recent CX Optimisation Masterclass presented in partnership with AB Tasty. If you’d like to watch the whole Masterclass, you can find the full recording on the Delacon YouTube channel.

Learn more about Call Tracking

If you would like to learn more about Delacon’s Call Tracking solution, or any of our other products, please get in touch to organise a live demo.