Hospitality Brands: Facing the Pressure with Digital Solutions + NEW AUDIBLE VERSION
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Everyone has had those horrid travel days. Everything seems to go wrong. You forget your passport, your wallet, or worse still, you forget your headphones. Nothing seems to top off a bad travel experience than a flight getting canceled or having a hotel lose your room reservation
Unfortunately for millions of people in recent memory, having a flight canceled is practically baked into the travel plans. The frustrations of dealing with the various customer care teams aren't generally baked into their travel plans.
For whatever reason, certain travelers are left on hold for hours, and for better or worse, these travelers are forced to use only a handful of support and engagement channels. Khoros is here to prove there’s much more to customer engagement in the travel industry than Twitter and outdated phone systems.
A New Approach
It’s clear that travel brands need to expand their reach into new channels and customer engagement methods, but what might be the best path to accomplish this? Thankfully, Khoros’ customer Airbnb has provided a perfect game plan.
In 2020 Airbnb was rated best in class for their community using the Khoros platform. A principal reason for this award was Airbnb's ability to empower its community users. The Airbnb community supports five different languages, and hosts and guests can use the community to customize everything about their accounts and experiences. The community is known for organizing meet-ups and idea sharing, and most importantly, guests and hosts can get community-based support whenever there's a problem. While it seems almost too simple to work this well, Airbnb proved that a strong community could increase customer engagement passively.
You can read the full Airbnb kudos award here!
Customer Engagement Means More than only Care
It’s generally accepted that most people will only interact with a travel brand when they have a question or issue they need resolving. However, only focusing on the care side of engagement would be a rather significant misstep. Marketing in new channels to draw in new customers is a delicate dance. It's crucial that you stay relevant with the new customers but in a way that might alienate your current customer base.
Irish Airline Ryanair has taken this in stride with their viral TikTok account. For the unaware, Ryanair is a budget airline known for many things but known that it’s the cheapest way from point A to point B in Europe. However, not always the most comfortable. There won’t be a lot of bells and whistles. Countless jokes circulate on Twitter about how there are no windows for specific seats on a Ryanair flight, the landings can be rough, or what have you.
A brand could do one of two things. Either they could not engage, or they could own up to their reputation. Ryanair has done the latter. The Ryanair TikTok account is full of videos making fun of themselves. As a result, they have amassed an enormous following on TikTok with (at the time of writing) 1.7 million followers. This is how a brand does stellar customer engagement.
It Could Be All Sunshine and Rainbows
The brands struggling to meet the above success levels could utilize several tactics available through the Khoros platform. For customer Care, it’s quite simple. Suppose you are an airline, and for whatever reason, your customers are missing flights or luggage or what have you. With Khoros Care, you’ll be able to improve your agent health, NPS scores, and operational efficiency by getting customers help faster through the power of automation and AI. All of these turn directly into cost savings and higher ROI by deflecting calls to your contact center.
For the travel brand communities out there, Airbnb shows that it’s clear that by letting your customers have a majority role in the engagement of your community, intrepid travelers are more than likely to enjoy and heavily engage with your online community, reducing the volume on your Care team.
Lastly, with Khoros marketing, you can instantly expand your social engagement channels. Some brands will focus solely on Twitter via native publishing. With Khoros Marketing, you could easily make the same Twitter post and publish it on Facebook, Instagram, or even TikTok with only a handful of clicks.
Customer engagement is constantly evolving, and the brands that evolve with it stay relevant and continue to grow their customer base. The brands that don’t are still only using Twitter.
For more resources and stories on how brands are using Khoros visit the links below!
