“Tealeaf’s customer experience data has become a common language at ARC. From customer service and the development team, to product management and the executive staff, Tealeaf provides the common thread in how we talk about servicing our customers better.”-- Michael Tarajos, Customer Experience Management Lead, ARC
Customer Profile - Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) is an airline-owned company providing ticket distribution, as well as reporting and financial settlement services for over 150 air and rail carriers, and more than 20,000 ARC-accredited travel agencies and corporate travel departments in the United States, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Processing over $77 billion in transactions annually, and with thirty-nine months of transaction data depositories accessible online, ARC is the hub for travel settlement and data solutions.
Vendor Profile - Tealeaf is the leading provider of online customer experience management solutions. Tealeaf's CX family of solutions provides unprecedented enterprise-wide visibility into every user's unique online interactions. This “360-degree view” of the online customer experience enables a clear and consistent understanding of the customer for ebusiness, IT, customer service and legal and compliance executives and their organizations across a wide range of vertical industries including retail, banking, travel, insurance, telecommunications, pharmaceutical and transportation. Founded in 1999, Tealeaf is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and is privately-held.
RETURN ON INVESTMENT
- 50% increase in first call resolution rate
- 50% reduction in escalations to production support and development
- Reduced the time to identify, reproduce and resolve site flaws by more than 50%
BACKGROUND
Building on more than four decades of experience as the premier provider of financial settlement solutions and data and analytical services for the travel industry, ARC today continues to develop innovative technology solutions designed to accommodate the needs of more than 20,000 travel agencies and corporate travel departments across the United States.
With more than 4 million travel transactions occurring each week, it was only a matter of time before the company began migrating key applications from a legacy, terminal-based environment to a new, more flexible, web-based environment. Given the world’s foremost carriers place their trust in ARC for prompt and reliable settlement services, the company needed to ensure it could maintain its high level of service during this time of transition, and beyond.
CHALLENGES
ARC knew its clients were eagerly awaiting the rollout of their new, web-based applications, and the inherent enhancements that would come with them, such as improved task flow and point and click navigation. However, the company was concerned that they wouldn’t be able to provide the requisite level of service its customers had come to expect. ARC’s former “green screen” applications enabled mirror logins, so whenever a travel agent called into customer support with an issue, the ARC service representative was able to simultaneously log into the application as that travel agent and help them quickly resolve the problem. In addition, ARC’s legacy applications incorporated homegrown functionally that monitored and captured all user sessions in order to meet the company’s legal and compliance requirements. The challenge for ARC, now that all their applications were migrating to the Internet, was figuring out a way to replicate both of these critical business capabilities without rebuilding or disrupting their new, web-based applications.
A NEW APPROACH
After conducting a diligent search in the market for a potential solution, ARC selected Tealeaf’s online Customer Experience Management (CEM) solution. With Tealeaf, ARC confidently meets their legal and compliance requirements to monitor and capture all user transactions. In addition, Tealeaf’s replay ability—a page-by-page, browser-level recording of the actual customer experience—provides ARC service representatives and customers with the level of service they are accustomed to giving and receiving.
But Tealeaf’s robust solution affords even greater benefits to the company. Unlike their legacy, homegrown solution, Tealeaf includes sophisticated search and indexing functionality that enables ARC to easily discover the magnitude of specific customer experience flaws and prioritize fixes accordingly. And, because Tealeaf itself is so easy to use, ARC has rolled out access to more than 100 users across the enterprise—from customer service, production support and development, to product management, compliance and legal. When resolving issues or discussing product enhancements, ARC relies on Tealeaf’s online customer experience information to identify opportunities for improvement, drive requirements and set priorities. In fact, Tealeaf, and the capabilities that it delivers, has become a corporate standard for the delivery of all online products and services at ARC.
WIN 1 - CUSTOMER SERVICE TEAM IMPROVES FIRST CALL RESOLUTION RATE BY 50%
Problem
When the initial web-based applications went live, the company’s customer service representatives (CSR) lacked the ability to log in as a specific travel agent in order to see and resolve issues. Accustomed to this level of support, travel agents who were experiencing problems on the new applications began printing screens and faxing them into ARC customer service. The repetitive back and forth faxing was extremely frustrating for everyone and led to an increase in problem escalations to the ARC production support team.
Solution
Once access to Tealeaf was rolled out within the call center, ARC service representatives had the ability to immediately pull up Tealeaf sessions and again “see” customer experience problems firsthand. As a page-by-page, browser-level recording of a customer’s unique visit, Tealeaf’s session replay allows a customer service representative (CSR) to review the exact screens and actions a specific customer saw and did on the site. This visibility enables the CSR to quickly diagnosis whether the customer compliant is a real, technical obstacle on the site, which should be escalated to production support, or whether the problem is simply due to user error or confusion, which the CSR can resolve single handedly.
Benefit
The full user experience replay provided by Tealeaf, which has become part of ARC’s customer service process, enables service representatives to address customer issues immediately—resulting in a 50% improvement in the team’s first call resolution rate. In addition, for those calls that still do require escalation, the ARC service representative is now required to include the Tealeaf session ID in the problem ticket. Instant access to the user session in question has reduced by more than 50% the time the ARC production support and development teams require to identify, reproduce and resolve
site issues.
WIN 2 - PRODUCTION SUPPORT GETS PROACTIVE, REDUCES ESCALATIONS BY 50%
Problem
The original web-based applications were built so that when an internal error did occur, the application automatically displayed an “application error, please call support” message. Following instructions, travel agents who saw this message would call the ARC customer service center. But the CSRs handling these calls had no visibility into the site’s problems; as a result, they would have to escalate all of these issues to production support. Production support would then research the problems and report their findings back to the CSRs, who in turn would get back to the travel agents who had called. The process was reactive, cumbersome and costly—to say the least.
Solution
Using Tealeaf’s real-time alerting capability, ARC’s production support team was able to establish a new, proactive approach to the problem. Now, every time one of the applications generates an “application error” message, the production support team is instantly notified—allowing them to intervene immediately. Often times, this means before a travel agent has time to call into the help desk, the issue has either been fixed, or the help desk is at least made aware of the problem and can communicate appropriately with incoming callers.
Benefit
Because ARC is now proactively resolving issues as they happen, instead of waiting for customers to encounter them first and report them, the company has been able to limit the number of customers who are impacted by these types of errors. In addition, ARC has been able to reduce the number of escalations to production support by 50%. And, the company is now able to quantify the magnitude of each problem—how many users experienced this obstacle—in order to prioritize fixes appropriately.
WIN 3 – THE VISIBILITY TEALEAF AFFORDS LEADS TO SURPRISING BUSINESS DISCOVERIES
Problem
Given the nature of their business, ARC is potentially a target for fraudulent activities. Because of this, the company needs to be diligent about tracking who’s using their web-enabled systems and where are they located.
Solution
With Tealeaf, ARC has unprecedented visibility into every user’s unique online transactions— beyond typical aggregate information—which allows the company to verify its users on a daily basis.
Benefit
When Tealeaf calculated that more than 25% of ARC users were coming from outside the United States, this immediately raised red flags within the legal and compliance departments. But because Tealeaf captures each individual session, the company was able to quickly determine that these were in fact genuine customers. What Tealeaf enabled ARC to recognize was the fact that many of their accredited travel agencies and corporate travel departments were hiring outsourced employees from international locations. The realization that ARC was truly a global company allowed the organization to make some simple changes to business operations that would allow them to service their global customer base better, such as 24x7 access to critical applications and more appropriate service windows. This one discovery made ARC realize the power Tealeaf’s customer experience visibility affords. Now, ARC product managers and executives regularly use Tealeaf to explore opportunities for improvement and innovation and build better online solutions for their customers.
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