SNTTA Delivers First-class Customer Service with Altitude Software

Altitude Software, a global provider of omnichannel solutions to deliver great customer experiences, today announced that the SNTTA travel agency has implemented Altitude uCI in its multimedia contact center to deliver great service and handle the fast-paced growth of its operations in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The SNTTA contact centers are located in three sites across the UAE, and are now powered by the Altitude uCI 8 solution, giving the travel management company a wealth of advanced contact center features, including unified agent desktops, voice portals, as well as centralized monitoring, queuing, routing and reporting solutions that optimize service and increase productivity in the contact center.

SNTTA pioneered one-stop travel related solutions in the UAE

SNTTA was established in Sharjah, U.A.E, in 1976, as Sharjah National Travel & Tourist Agency, from which the acronym SNTTA originated. In a few years, the company expanded rapidly across the UAE to become an award-winning travel management company. Today, SNTTA is a one-stop travel related solutions provider in UAE – offering a full spectrum of travel related services, including business travel, leisure travel, travel insurance, as well as meetings and events. SNTTA has a wide network of 25 offices across the emirates of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ras Al Khaimah, Ajman and Fujairah and is one of the leading travel brands in the region. SNTTA is executing on plans to expand with new travel offices and new corporate accounts. It considered technology as a key factor in helping to maximise efficiency, differentiate itself on customer service excellence and ensure its continued success in the UAE. “In its pursuit of customer service excellence, SNTTA is consistently looking for ways to be more productive, more efficient, and improve business processes internally to boost customer satisfaction,’’ said K. Valsa Kumar, Group General Manager – Finance & Admin, SNTTA.

Improving customer satisfaction while boosting productivity

The SNTTA contact center handles multichannel customer interactions by telephone, email and Web. Business operations within the contact center include reservations, update on special travel offers, online payments and registrations for customized private events, excursions and desert safari programmes. “With the new system, we have managed to increase first call resolution, create consistency in our incoming call management and make our contact center operations far more effective,” commented
Mr. Kumar. Thus, the quality of service at SNTTA has improved significantly, with more than 94% of first call resolution rates. In addition, the average speed of answer has shortened from 20 seconds to 8 seconds since the beginning of 2015.

Selecting a powerful solution to meet new business challenges

SNTTA receives several thousand calls monthly from customers and prospects wishing to obtain travel booking details or requiring a reservation change. There are also inbound interactions handled on behalf of special airline and loyalty programmes, as well as specific outbound telemarketing campaigns. To deal with the increasingly more numerous and complex interactions and campaigns required a more powerful solution that enabled better management of peak times and ensured a rigorous follow-up on customer requests and processes.

Commenting on SNTTA contact centre software selection, Kumar said: “When we built our new contact center, our goal was to equip it with best-in-class products and technologies. That vision applied to our customer interaction management solution as well, so we looked comprehensively at the market and chose Altitude uCI because it offered the most complete and cost-effective solution for our contact centre. In addition to providing a single suite of integrated contact centre capabilities, Altitude also provides a local support presence across the entire United Arab Emirates, from Sharjah to Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Jebel Ali. These points made Altitude a clear winner as it matches with our plans to expand our contact center to other departments within the SNTTA group,” he added.

Nowadays, more than 85% of SNTTA customer interactions are telephone-based, and that makes efficient inbound call distribution and management of paramount importance. But as the importance of other contact channels is bound to grow SNTTA also recognized the need to manage email and Web inquiries with the same efficiency as calls. Regarding this point, Kumar added: “Today, whether our customers call our toll-free number in UAE, email us or book online, they can be assured of high quality service and a swift response. All these touchpoints have been designed with customer service excellence in mind.” SNTTA is also planning to take advantage of the extensive multichannel contact handling capabilities of the Altitude platform to extend its multichannel services through web chat as well as social media interactions.

High-performance system sets stage for the future

In addition to providing a centralized platform for its travel agency operations, SNTTA’s contact center is also providing customized CRM solutions to fill the specific needs of other customer-oriented businesses. “We have the technology and the know-how to support contact centre outsourcing operations 24/7 with a strong focus on the travel management and loyalty industries,“ concluded Kumar.

“Customer satisfaction is essential to SNTTA’s service delivery and brand reputation in a very competitive travel management market. By deploying Altitude uCI, SNTTA has added a key dimension to its customer care offering,” commented Riadh Boukhris, Altitude Software MENA President. “Altitude’s multimedia contact centre solution enables this fast-growing travel management company to serve its customers more effectively and efficiently.”