Traventia Uses Amazon Connect to Reach its Destination

Spanish travel company Traventia was enjoying triple-digit growth in revenue and needed to keep that momentum without seeing service suffer or costs increase. As it expanded into France, Italy, and Portugal, things were looking up. But the road to success can be bumpy.

Traventia specializes in helping customers book highly customized, personalized travel packages, including transport, accommodation, and activities. “You can go anywhere and have full customization of your package,” explains David Robledo, Traventia’s founder and chief technology officer (CTO). “Not the standard ‘seven-days-and-six-nights’ package with everything fixed. We’ve had customers construct unique packages that nobody else has ever had. That’s what makes us different.”

That customizability—what made Traventia special—came at the cost of complex customer service calls and long queue times.

Traventia had been using a traditional contact center since its launch in 2014, queuing voice calls from customers in sequence and hoping customers would stay on the line long enough to connect with an agent. This applied to both pre-sales inquiries and post-sales service.

But when Robledo saw Amazon Connect in early 2018, he was impressed by its capabilities. What really appealed to the organization was having control of everything—queue flows, self-service options, prioritizing customers based on travel date or history—in house and being able to structure the call flow to best suit Traventia at any given time.

Eager to experiment, Robledo built a minimum viable product (MVP) to test Amazon Connect on Traventia’s two most common types of customers calls: canceling bookings and downloading travel vouchers.

By diverting just those two types of calls out of the main queue and allowing customers the option to self-serve, the volume of calls going to an agent was reduced by 10 percent in just 2 days. “We then decided to transfer other parts of our contact center to Amazon Connect and it reduced agent intervention by 25 percent with no negative impact on call resolution,” says Robledo. The move also resulted in a 92 percent decrease in complaints about the the quality of phone service.

Building a lasting connection with customers requires prompt and flexible responses to their needs. Thanks to Amazon Connect, Traventia was able to personalize customer service on the fly. For example, it was able to create a special call flow that allowed people to be served quickly, away from the regular queue, when a promotion in Spain increased call volumes.

When Traventia saw calls from Portugal spike to 300 percent of normal demand, the company quickly launched a specialized flow to address those calls without overwhelming agents in the general queue who were able to continue providing normal service. Amazon Connect has helped Traventia respond to fluctuations with aplomb.

“We can also prioritize call flows by season. In the winter, people like to travel to skiing destinations and, in summer, they like to go to the beach. Redistributing resources is easy with Amazon Connect. We can also balance who we service and how. We can let customers who are traveling—at the airport or hotel, for example—go to the front of the queue as those types of urgent calls are stressful for customers. We can also give loyal customers priority over someone calling us for the first time. We value all customers, but you do have to balance your response to need and urgency,” says Robledo.

And Traventia was doing a great job. Its abandonment rate—the percentage of callers who disconnect before getting service—dropped from 42 percent to 11 percent. It was handling 37 percent more calls than the previous year with the same number of agents. 

Then things changed in a way Traventia could not have predicted.

When COVID-19 hit and travel restrictions came into effect, Traventia was inundated with travelers calling to cancel. It was able to change its Amazon Connect flow to prioritize customers who were traveling that day so they wouldn’t be stranded and provide advice to other callers so they weren’t waiting longer than needed.

“At the peak of the pandemic, our traffic dropped more than 90 percent,” says Robledo. “But because Amazon Connect is so flexible, we could scale back things we didn’t need, such as reporting, to cut costs. We could do this while still being able to serve customers as needed while our agents worked from home.”

Now that travel restrictions are easing again, Traventia has been able to rapidly scale up its capabilities to get travelers moving again. According to Robledo, the company has rebounded in the first half of 2021, booking more travel than it did during the same period in 2019. And it’s doing that with a smaller team of agents and a smaller IT team than it had in 2019. The company plans to use this efficiency to grow and expand into other markets, starting first in other European countries.

“Thanks to the possibilities of Amazon Connect, we can provide more personalized attention and improve customer satisfaction,” says Robledo. “We are so happy that we have a project under way to transfer all of our customer service telephone service to Amazon Connect in the coming months.”