A leading American airline improves overall efficiency by reducing process handle time, leading to business value-add of USD 1 Million annually

Client Background

The client is one of the largest airlines in the US with more than 75,000 employees. It serves an extensive domestic and international network spread across over 50 countries. The client represents more than 15% of overall US domestic market. 

Industry Landscape

The global airline industry continues to grow rapidly. However, consistent and robust profitability remains elusive. Currently, the industry is witnessing increasing pressure to reduce cost and improve operational efficiency while enabling high customer experience. Airlines need to make large and ongoing process improvements to operate more efficiently.

Opportunity

The client witnessed a huge surge in customer interaction volumes, for both, chat and emails. However, this need could not be met efficiently as the client was not in a position to add more staff, leading to high backlog and increase in abandon rate. The client wanted to meet customer requirements with the current staff strength and keep the abandon rate within the defined SLA of 5%. This called for a relook of the entire process.

Solution

Wipro carried out extensive brainstorming sessions to identify the causes of high processing time, and also did a detailed process mapping to know the areas of improvement, which helped the team:

•  Identify the steps in the customer service process which was increasing the process time and not adding any value to the process
•  Removed non-value-add steps from the process flow
•  Identified appropriate queues to route the cases which reduced the to and fro of emails from one queue to the other
•  Conducted training to enable the team in assigning cases to defined queues
•  Redesigned the entire process flow
•  Created visual displays on floors to represent dynamic daily production status which was updated on real time basis

Business Impact

Wipro helped the client reduce the overall average handle time (AHT) of the customer service process by 100 seconds. As a result, the client was able to handle more transactions. This helped the client and its end-users in resolving their queries on time with more than 95 percent accuracy.

•  Savings of $1 Million annually
•  Reduction in the overall AHT for the process by 20%

Wipro proactively revisited & optimized the chat and email process for our esteemed client to improve our response time that helped us to handle additional volumes, thus improving our efficiency gains on turnaround times and having a positive impact on Customer Experience.

"Wipro proactively revisited & optimized the chat and email process for our esteemed client to improve our response time that helped us to handle additional volumes, thus improving our efficiency gains on turnaround times and having a positive impact on Customer Experience."

-Hoshendar Nari Contractor, Vertical Head for Travel, Transport & Hospitality, Wipro