Creating a holiday experience to really remember

As part of Australasia’s largest independent travel company, Hoot Holiday provides relaxing vacations for thousands of people every year.

Hoot came to us with an exciting proposal. How could we work together to make the booking process for those holidays as rewarding and relaxing as the holidays themselves?

Hoot’s greatest strength was its staff members and their commitment to exciting their customers, and they needed a cohesive set of customer experience principles that would help them support their staff to excite their customers, provide added value and see the journey through beyond just the booking.

To find the best way to empower, motivate and support Hoot’s staff, we knew we’d have to walk the proverbial mile in their shoes, defining the current customer journey and improving it step by step.

We work hand in hand with our customers, building trust by placing them at the centre of every decision. We know our clients are experts in their field and that it always pays to listen to an expert.

That’s why we started overcoming this challenge by sitting down with key stakeholders and travel consultants to absorb their insights and build a more in-depth and more cohesive picture of current experience from their perspective.

Having connected with Hoot’s staff to help define the challenges to be overcome, we conducted in-depth customer-led research to build out the current customer journey. All our design-led services are based on moments of truth provided by the customer.

Through immersive walkthroughs, net promoter research, customer interviews, call jacking, email analysis and a range of other research techniques, we were able to experience for ourselves the emotions and context of the service experience from both a customer and staff point of view.

Turning these moments of truth into a current customer journey provided a vivid and visual map of the experience of Hoot’s Call Centre staff, touchpoint by touchpoint.

This visual representation of the actions, thoughts and feelings of customer and consultants as they moved through the Hoot experience was vital in allowing us and other key stakeholders to step into the shoes of their travel consultants.

Illuminating this often-overlooked perspective is vital in building empathy with how your staff and customers interact.

With the current customer journey mapped out, we moved through it, touchpoint by touchpoint, turning pain points into opportunities for improvement and innovation. Working with Hoot, we developed 8 CX Principles that would allow staff to deliver a consistent, ideal experience for their customers.

These principles would also put the customer’s needs at the heart of the decision-making process, enabling management to make decisions with confidence and turn customer knowledge into growth.

Through an entirely new set of sales scripts, videos, prompts, and training, we re-engineered a system that could be used to excite their clients by providing added value across their whole journey.

To make sure this new process was the ideal fit for Hoot staff, we broke down the sales process, step by step and validated with Hoot’s premier agents before testing it with real clients to ensure it worked perfectly.

Moving from the current to the future, we mapped out the ideal of a four-month journey, from enquiry to planning, to booking and through the actual holiday and the aftercare contact to make sure the customer was genuinely delighted.

We created new, highly visual email templates that emphasised the journey, rather than just the sale, using customer-centric language to build excitement about their holiday and highlight the support Hoot was able to provide.

To create a customer experience that consistently delivered the basics so brilliantly that their customers want to make them an ongoing part of their holiday planning, Hoot needed a structure that would create internal alignment around focussing on the whole customer journey, not just the sale.

By conducting rigorous, customer-led research and embracing the complexity that everyone else shies away from, we were able to develop a set of solutions that mobilised Hoot staff to deliver an exciting and rewarding customer experience for their customers.

We created absolutely clarity on what Hoot’s customers needed, giving them the confidence to implement a framework that inspired and ignited a shift within the organisation towards a more customer-centric culture and ensured consistency in thinking and approach organisation-wide.