Contact centres are ubiquitous throughout the Travel & Hospitality industry. Research shows that customers far prefer the phone for interacting with travel companies than any other alternative. Often phones are a company's first and primary point of contact with the public; a company carries a large part of its public image through its phone interactions. Contact centres are expensive to run and keep staffed with fully trained employees. The majority of calls concern routine matters - brochure requests or branch locations, for example - simple things that are an inefficient and costly use of an agent's time.

Airlines were experiencing increasing problems with customer satisfaction and falling levels of business travel before 9/11 - and the subsequent concerns about the safety of travel has only made a bad situation worse. Now, airlines need to forge substantial and ongoing customer relationships to ensure superior frequent-flyer care and retention. As airlines are rapidly moving away from payment of commissions to travel agents, there will be even greater demand on airline contact centres to provide the level of service that customers expect. Airlines need to branch into more cost efficient means of managing routine information needs, superior customer care and maximizing the number of transactions. These transactions include integrated travel services, such as hotel, car rental, and other needs at the time of booking.

In addition to customer care is the issue of security. Transportation security authorities and aviation administrations around the world will look to introduce new legislation and requirements focused on airport security. Employees too will be seeking heightened security access to restricted and employee-only areas of airport facilities. The industry faces not just contact centre concerns, but also serious infrastructure concerns. Airlines are being forced to reduce their labour costs - the only question is how they are to achieve these savings.

Interactive Voice Response solutions are the obvious, cost-effective answer. Contact centres are one of the top areas in which travel companies spend money. DTMF based IVR and speech recognition solutions can automate the routine calls that comprise the bulk of any contact centre's call volume. The natural language understanding capabilities of our speech enabled solutions allows for flexible responses to caller enquiries, making interactions easy and complete, while the system is able to handle many calls simultaneously - both necessities for any contact centre. In addition, the IP Integration payments processing and speaker verification products, utilising a voice authentication system that works simply from an individual's unique voiceprint offers the highest levels of accuracy, allowing transactions to be securely managed.

Voice-driven automation results in greatly reduced hold times for callers, who don't have to wait for "the next available agent" and shorter call durations, which translate into drastically reduced operating costs for the centres, bringing about a rapid return on investment for Travel and Hospitality companies. Additionally, callers experience increased customer satisfaction, as their problems and requests are dealt with more quickly and efficiently. Agents are freed up to deal with more complex tasks. Depending on the level of automation, which as yet in some industries is very low, fewer agents are needed, slashing operating costs for the centre.

Given the dynamic nature of the travel marketplace today, companies are focusing on major customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives and operating efficiencies to gain a competitive advantage and reduce costs. Travel companies must strive to enhance their customer care and leverage their Web investments to provide superior and efficient service to a global customer base. In addition, travel companies must meet changing customer expectations that include:

• Security
  Provide a safe and secure travel experience
• Self-service
  The ability to manage transactions on their own
• Convenience
  Anytime, anywhere access
• Expediency
  Reduce wait/hold times and transfers
• Transparency
  Similar user interfaces across channels
• Efficiency
  The Web sets new standards

Speech recognition technologies let travel companies complement their e-business solutions with an extraordinarily friendly, over-the-telephone caller experience that results in higher customer loyalty and the attraction of new customers. You can even let your company's "personality" shine through, in the voice talent and caller interactions you choose.

IP Integration offers the most advanced technology solutions in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Text-To-Speech (TTS) and Speaker Verification (ASV) to bring the benefits of speech to the travel industry. Our products are open, standards-based, and multi-language. We offer professional services if your company needs assistance with development and implementation. We also offer a unique consultancy service to help you from the application discovery stage through the launch of your speech service.

IP Integration offers travel, transportation and hospitality companies the ability to bridge the digital divide and bring secure, self-service transactions to customers and employees via the telephone. Services using ASR, TTS, and biometric speaker verification technologies let callers complete routine enquiries and transactions quickly and easily from any phone at any time.

Contact us and find out how speech and IP Integration can help your businesses or organisation to improve efficiency while providing first class customer service. We can help you to find a voice for your business.

For an introductory meeting or quotations please contact IP Integration direct
on 0118 918 4600 or email us at contact@ipintegration.com