“Talisma Digital Platform has made a significant difference to our business. We have always believed that communication lies at the heart of any drive designed to offer a memorable experience to guests. The benefits we got from our investment in Talisma’s digital offering have validated this belief. I would like to add that as our trusted technology partner, Talisma has been an enabler in realizing our goal of providing a consistent experience to all our internal and external stakeholders and helped us get a better and faster ROI”.
Rahul Rattan,
Head, Customer Contact Centre at ITC Hotels
About ITC
ITC Forayed into the Hotels business to support the national priority of developing new avenues of foreign exchange earnings and boosting tourism. Beginning with the Sheraton Chola, Chennai in 1975, ITC’s journey in this business has redefined the face of Indian hospitality. Today, ITC Hotels is one of the largest hotel chains in the Country with over 100 hotels across 70 destinations. Symbolized by its distinctive ‘Namaste’ logo, ITC Hotels integrated India’s fine tradition of hospitality with globally benchmarked services.
With a string of firsts to its credit, ITC Hotels pioneered the concepts of branded accommodation, branded cuisine, environment and guest safety. ITC Hotels is an exemplar in sustainable hospitality with all its premium hotels being LEED® Platinum certified.
ITC is one of India’s foremost multi-business enterprise with a market capitalization of US $ 40 billion and a turnover of US $ 8 billion.
Business challenge
ITC Hotels was looking for a solution to empower its Guest Contact Centre team to effectively manage hotel reservations related queries, requests and issues raised by its aggressively growing guest base. There used to be lot of manual interventions and difficulty in collaborating with different teams leading to delays. There was no proper mechanism to ensure SLA compliance causing significant guest dissatisfaction.
Management team also wanted to have better visibility into the operations so wanted to go with a unified digital platform and hence the company turned to Talisma.
The key challenges being faced by ITC Hotels include:
- High degree of manual intervention leading to data inconsistencies, duplication of effort causing operational inefficiencies and unnecessary delays
- Soaring operational costs and the need to improve guest experience
- Top management had limited insights into guest engagements
- Issues concerning compliance with stringent SLAs and measure guest satisfaction
- No means to seamlessly exchange information across functions
- Difficulty collating timely information from multiple sources to provide actionable insights to the management
- Guest satisfaction and retention in a highly competitive environment
ITC Hotels decided to go with Talisma after an extensive exercise in diligence. Before deploying Talisma, ITC Hotels was using a third-party email application to manage its communication needs. The solution was unable to scale up to meet ITC Hotels’ growing guest experience management needs. ITC Hotels chose Talisma Digital Platform because:
- Talisma’s extensive experience in implementing omni- channel solutions across various industry verticals and helping organizations in enhancing their customer’s experience
- Talisma Digital Platform’s ease of use, maintenance and configurability in terms of defining business rules, mapping different processes and creating role-based user personas for different user groups
- Compatibility across different mail server platforms
- In-depth analytics capabilities to measure KPIs
- Ability to enable additional touch points and extend the solution footprint depending on the dynamic business needs
- Talisma being a one-stop shop for providing end to end solution, the complete ownership and accountability of the solution lies with one technology provider leading to faster turn around
The evaluation parameters
Talisma CEM Solution was evaluated against the best-of- breed products on multiple parameters including, but not limited to the following:
- Credibility of the organization
- Maturity of the product and implementation experience
- Richness of features and functionality
- Solution fitment to the existing and future business needs of ITC Hotels
- Flexibility and Scalability of the solution
- Ease of usage and maintenance
Today, ITC Hotels’ Guest Contact Centre Team comprising third-party BPO service provider is using Talisma Digital Platform. The solution’s customer service management capabilities are being used to enable guests to reach out to ITC Guest Contact Centre for managing their reservation(s).
Solution highlights
- Intelligent routing rules for automatically routing cases to the relevant teams based on reservation source, hotel chosen, the request is aligned to, guest segment and agent load
- Well defined escalation & SLA management
- Pre-defined repository of frequently used responses
- Automatic trigger based e-mail alerts and notifications to leads/supervisors in case of any escalation
- Talisma analytics to draw out reports to measure key metrics such as TAT, AHT, TAT compliance, agent productivity, case status and volume across teams
Talisma Digital Platform meets ITC’s business challenges
Talisma offered ITC Hotels a robust centralized platform to effectively handle thousands of guest e-mails while ensuring that no guest e-mail slipped through the cracks and each communication gets a prompt response. Various teams within ITC Hotels now have a unified view of the guest including interaction history enabling them to service guests better.
Top valuable features of Talisma Digital Platform according to ITC Hotels
- Ease of usage leading to faster user adoption
- High configurability to enable ITC Hotels to extend the usage of the Talisma across other hotels
- Compatibility across different e-mail servers and protocols
- Workflow automation capabilities to streamline processes
- Ability to provide a seamless experience to internal and external stakeholders
- Analytics capabilities to empower us collate timely, accurate information and reports for providing better visibility into daily operations and take necessary actions
- Scope for improving guest experience
ITC Hotels’ guests now benefit from a single interaction resolution approach of the hotel. Talisma Digital Platform has helped the hotel chain drive collaboration across teams with ease of information sharing, enhanced monitoring and tracking all of which are also available to the management. The cost of service and service time have come down significantly while the service quality has gone up thanks to improved agent productivity.
ITC Hotels is thus able to live up its reputation as a premier guest service provider and able to add and retain more guests. ITC Hotels has also enhanced the ROI derived from Talisma Digital Platform by extending the system to other hotels as well.
Key benefits
- Significant reduction in support costs due to automation of processes and increase in agent productivity
- Better SLA compliance due to better monitoring and tracking with automated alerts and notifications to concerned stakeholders
- Improved key metrics being tracked by the management
- Better monitoring, tracking and visibility to the senior management
- Seamless collaboration across different teams for faster resolution improving the overall guest experience
Benefits in numbers
- 43% increase in guest satisfaction
- 36% decrease in AHT
- 32% increase in contact centre productivity
- 24% of cost savings
The path ahead
ITC Hotels plans to further strengthen Talisma Digital Platform’s footprint across other touch points and leverage its omni-channel capabilities, new functionalities and features released from time to time and map the entire guest journey onto a single platform.
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