“A seven star” experience: How TravelPerk is redefining customer care with Twilio

Results

The big win

To better care for existing customers and attract new users, TravelPerk needed to unify its disparate customer care channels all into one place and build out its customer data infrastructure.

Recognizing the need to establish a unified, scalable data pipeline, TravelPerk decided to partner with Twilio Segment. TravelPerk uses Connections and Protocols to collect and standardize data across all business units using one platform. With a unified customer data pipeline through Twilio Segment and a Twilio Flex-powered contact center in place, Travelperk provides its customers with a next-level customer engagement experience, beginning with their very first encounter with the travel company.

Business travel can be expensive, and typical booking solutions are not always user-friendly, or even accessible for small businesses. The Barcelona-based travel management platform, TravelPerk, thinks bigger than your average five star travel booking experience. TravelPerk is pioneering simplified business travel for small to medium sized companies. 

TravelPerk’s platform is one that works for the entire organization—empowering financial administrators to manage bookings and eliminating the need for travelers to report individual receipts. Travelers have access to booking information at their fingertips, as well as an unrivaled customer care experience.

To TravelPerk, superb customer care is supporting users from their very first encounter with the platform all the way until they embark on their trip.

Drawing insight from customer data across the organization

As the largest global travel management platform, TravelPerk knew it needed to more deeply understand who its users were well before they began using the platform to book trips. But, the travel company lacked insight into its customer data and had no standard procedure for data governance.

Recognizing the need to establish a unified, scalable data pipeline, TravelPerk decided to partner with Twilio Segment. TravelPerk uses Connections and Protocols to collect and standardize data across all business units using one platform. This enables the engineering and product teams to access trusted customer data to inform business- critical decisions. With Segment, TravelPerk was able to significantly decrease engineering time and bolster collaboration between engineering and business teams.

Now, the product team can easily analyze customer data running through Twilio Segment from Google ads and Salesforce campaigns and create intuitive dashboards for its paid marketing team to measure campaign performance.

Understanding user behavior at every touchpoint with Twilio Segment enabled TravelPerk to build a variety of sophisticated marketing use cases like building lifecycle marketing campaigns to keep users engaged and influence them to upgrade their use of the platform or creating retargeting campaigns with Google ads.

Not only has Twilio Segment enabled TravelPerk to better serve its product, marketing and analytics team with good, clean customer data, but also its sales team. TravelPerk’s data team created an attribution model to find out how customers were first attracted to the website, as well as to provide more visibility into return users. Did the customer click on an ad for airport parking or did they find TravelPerk from an organic search? The custom model provides context for the whole customer journey, and gives TravelPerk’s sales team more insight into what sources leads come from, which allows them to better understand their motives and inform how they engage their customers in sales conversations.

“Thanks to Twilio Segment, we have coordination across engineering, data analytics, product, marketing and sales for the first time,” said Roger Torrents, TravelPerk’s Head of Data Operations.

An agent-inspired contact center

Once TravelPerk’s users become customers, its sights turn toward customer care. When busy travelers need to make their way home on-time for an important occasion, they need a way to make last-minute changes efficiently—and skip waiting on hold. But, last minute changes to bookings don’t appear out of thin air. This is where Travelsperk’s bespoke customer care contact center, Lighthouse, lights the way.

Before Lighthouse, TravePerk was using a variety of disparate customer support tools including an in-house call center and an external ticket-based support system. After analyzing the workflow of its customer care agents, TravelPerk noticed how much extra time was spent flipping back and forth between these channels, explained Roberto Mosca, a Senior Software Engineer at TravelPerk. 

"It was very fragmented,” said Roberto. “We were missing a way to gather the context around our customers in one place. We realized we needed something that would bring all this information together.”

In other words, TravelPerk knew that to maintain its signature “seven star” experience, it needed to make a change, explained Roberto. The team immediately saw the promise in Twilio Flex— a developer-friendly solution with all the building blocks they required to build quickly and iterate as they go.

"The core thing Flex enables us to do is build a personalized experience that we can customize for our agents,” said Raphael, Daverio, Senior Product Manager at TravelPerk. “We implemented custom components that aligned with how we do things internally. ”

Customized tools aligned to agents' workflow allows TravelPerk’s agents to more quickly serve customers—with context for each customer housed all in one place. With just the press of a button, agents are able to initiate conversations, anticipate customer queries with prequalified chats, and accommodate call back requests. Now that Twilio Flex powers the company’s call center, the average customer can connect to an agent in just four seconds.

“Twilio Flex allows us to simplify the workflow of our customer care agents to take actions on customer trips without having to leave the Lighthouse platform."

The simplified agent workflow was immediately reflected in Travelperk’s NPS scores, which rose to 95%. The 10/10 ratings quickly began rolling in:

(10/10) Super fast response when I contact you in the live chat

(10/10) Your customer service is always astonishing. Good job!

(10/10) Very prompt and courteous service by all agents

Upleveling customer care with data-informed workflows

With a unified customer data pipeline through Twilio Segment and a Twilio Flex-powered contact center in place, Travelperk provides its customers with a next-level customer engagement experience, beginning with their very first encounter with the travel company. The company’s ability to understand and deeply connect with its customers has manifested in its 95% NPS score.

Even with its signature seven star customer care experience, TravelPerk is not finished upleveling its customer engagement platform. The travel company plans to centralize every facet of customer support within Lighthouse. From building more automation for agents with chat bot functionality, to bringing email communication under the fold with Twilio SendGrid, TravelPerk will further streamline its customer care workflow with the help of Twilio’s APIs.