City Cruises by Hornblower is committed to providing exceptional travel experiences for adventurers across North America. Unfortunately, the QA teams in charge of training agents for better customer service were bogged down by manual processes, using spreadsheets and manual cross-checking to track performance.
On top of that, the travel industry was greatly disrupted in 2020 as a result of the pandemic. What quickly came to a halt then just as quickly started back up.
In 2021, City Cruises faced a new challenge of ramping up hiring and training in order to re-ignite travel. They needed a way to review customer service calls more quickly and efficiently to improve feedback loops to agents.
Challenges
City Cruise’s quality assurance process was very manual before bringing on Observe.AI. City Cruises’ previous solution was a traditional workforce management platform that forced their QA team to manage a spreadsheet with 60+ formulas in place to track scorecards and run reporting.
“Before artificial intelligence and this one-stop-shop for coaching, scoring & evaluating, our process was antique. We would listen to a call without being able to pinpoint specific moments on calls. Meeting our monthly goal of 2 calls per agent evaluated each month was tough.” —Dan Neufer, Training Manager, City Cruises by Hornblower
Solution
Verifiable, Specific Data.
With Observe.AI, City Cruises has eliminated the manual effort of sifting through entire calls to pull meaningful customer insights. With the ‘Analyze’ tab, City Cruises can drill into specific customer interactions and pinpoint key points of interest on calls to understand the context of the calls.
“Having real data of calls scored, whether they’re negative or positive, has enabled us to have a glimpse into the profile of each agent. Being able to verify guest’s requests and what they were promised has been very helpful for the management team.”
City Cruises also leverages data to run root cause analysis on its customer interactions to get a clearer look into the “why” behind calls, and more clearly understand call drivers.
Centralized & Streamlined Workflows.
The Observe.AI platform provides City Cruises with a faster way to run their essential tasks so that training leads can spend more time on strategic projects, such as building better training programs.
“We’re able to spend more time on training instead of quality management because of how streamlined our tasks are.” —Dan Neufer, Training Manager, City Cruises by Hornblower
Scaled, Remote Onboarding.
City Cruises’ 100% remote QA team expects to grow substantially in the next two years. With an aggressive onboarding timeline, the Observe.AI platform offers visibility into how new hires are performing, helping managers uncover call drivers, identify training opportunities, and give feedback to agents directly on the platform.
Looking Ahead
As City Cruises continues to grow, their management team is looking forward to using future-forward technologies such as quality assurance evaluations that leverage automation to speed up the feedback loop so that they can help more agents improve performance at scale.
“One thing we’re excited to leverage is the quick response of having calls scored automatically, and having the ability to use the evaluation form side by side with the call recording and call transcript—it’s so vital.” —Dan Neufer, Training Manager, City Cruises by Hornblower
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