Carnival Cruises Case Study

The fact that 50,000 questions are now answered every month shows how important it has become to the business

...we are able to analyse the questions customers ask

Giles Hawke Sales and Customer Services Director at P&O Cruises

Fast Facts
Client Carnival UK, one of the worlds largest leisure travel companies. Brands include Cunard Line, P&O Cruises, Princess Cruises and Seabourn. Challenge Overhaul how Carnival UK provides information to customers, staff and travel agents, making the information consistent, timely and accurate, and making it easy to find the right answers. Solution Transversals Web customer service suite allows users across any channel direct customers, travel agents, contact centre staff or on-board staff to obtain highly accurate, context-based answers by querying a central knowledgebase in natural language. Benefits 95% of queries resolved first time. Only 5% of customers escalate queries to the contact centre. 100% of email queries answered within 24 hours (compared with four days pre-implementation). Knowledgebase has become an integral part of customer service, queried 40,000-50,000 times each month. Contact centre call volumes reduced as more customers serve themselves online

Customer Background
Carnival UK was formed on 17 April 2003 following a merger between Carnival UK and P&O Princess Cruises plc. The merger created one of the worlds largest leisure travel companies. Carnival UKs brands include Cunard Line, P&O Cruises, Princess Cruises and Seabourn. Carnival UKs vision is to be the most spectacularly successful cruise company in Britain.

A key advantage is that we are able to analyse the questions customers ask. Giles Hawke, Sales and Customer Services Director at P&O Cruises

The Challenge
Carnival UK competes for holidaymakers at the top end against the backdrop of a world emerging from recession. The travel market has become even more competitive in recent times and holidaymakers need to be convinced that a cruise with a Carnival UK brand is the right choice for them. To make these decisions, timely, accessible and easy-to-use information is essential. Carnival UK identified that if it could enable more of its customers (both travel agents and members of the public) to solve routine queries online, it would provide customers with an added level of convenience while enabling contact centre staff to concentrate on more complex enquiries. This is particularly pertinent given that as a result of intensive marketing activity, Carnival UK is experiencing an exponential increase in traffic to the Web sites of its major brands. Visitor numbers on the P&O Cruises site were 97% higher in March 2011 than in March 2010. The Carnival UK contact centres also receive an average of 24,000 calls every month from direct customers and travel agents. With such large volumes of customer interaction, Carnival UK recognized that it needed not only to make it easier for customers to interact with the business but also to supplement its procedures for capturing their feedback.

Implementation
The Transversal solution was implemented on time and to budget in the following stages:

The cloud-based nature of the solution meant that Carnival UK had no need to change or invest in technological infrastructure. The biggest challenge was in getting employees to use the system. Carnival UK resolved this in a number of ways: Treasure hunts whereby employees could win prizes by finding redemption codes hidden within the knowledgebase. Buzz sessions knowledge sharing exercises with small groups of staff to immerse them in the system Webinars and online tutorials for travel agents.

The Solution
In late 2009, Carnival UK engaged specialist Web self-service provider Transversal. In doing so Carnival UK wanted to provide its customers with a powerful tool that was simple to use, saved time and provided them with answers to their questions 24 hours a day without needing to call a contact centre. Transversal satisfied Carnival UK that it alone was able to fully capture and exploit the know-how behind customer interactions through its unique Memory Engine search technology, which was tailored to match how the four main user groups direct customers, travel agents, contact centre staff and on-board staff ask questions. This proprietary technology enables computers to store and recall information by relating concepts like human memory. The Memory Engine starts with a generic understanding of how things are related. For example, it can identify that an apple is a type of fruit that grows on trees. Due to this rich baseline knowledge, Transversals solutions are able to understand and answer complex questions. As more content is added to the knowledgebase, the Memory Engine adapts its relationships and will quickly learn, for example, that an Apple can also be a type of computer.

The new Transversal self-help function has caught on quickly. The fact that 50,000 questions are now answered every month by the system shows how important it has become to the business. Providing customers with the ability to serve themselves via the website adds a convenience factor and frees up staff to deal with more complex queries and sales. Giles Hawke, Sales and Customer Services Director at P&O Cruises

Results
The solution has been highly successful across all four channels. Direct customers now have an easy-to-use tool that answers 95% of their questions first time, without the need to escalate queries further. Web traffic has doubled without increasing the volume of incoming email. Travel agents have more face to face interaction with customers since they dont need to phone the contact centre during appointments. Contact centre staff are now able to focus their efforts on more complex queries. They have speeded up email response times to under 24 hours, compared with an average of four days prior to the implementation. Staff on board ship have a new tool to help customers. Loyalty staff use it to sell future cruises. Since its implementation, the knowledgebase has been queried 141,000 times by Carnival UKs customer relations staff indicating a very high level of use. It has also proved to be an invaluable training tool, with new recruits able to get up to speed more quickly than before. All customer queries are tracked by the system which makes it easy to monitor performance. Customer feedback is captured, enabling answers to be continually updated and improved. Users can give each answer a star rating out of five. They can also send suggestions for improving the answer. Agents can use this feedback to update the knowledgebase, so that enquiries can be solved even more efficiently.

Underpinning the success of the implementation is that the knowledgebase powers all four channels and provides consistent, real-time information. It has become pivotal to Carnival UKs overall customer services operation and is queried 40,000 50,000 times every month.

There are now approximately 2500 entries in the knowledgebase. These provide a vast amount of information about dress codes, drinks packages, the Carnival UK Go Green initiative to name just a few subjects.

Prior to implementing the Transversal solution, Carnival UK was not able to communicate all this information to its customers quickly and consistently across all touchpoints. Now, however, its able to supply the know-how necessary for all its customers to enjoy their holiday.

Transversal Ltd Betjeman House 104 Hills Road Cambridge, CB2 1LQ Tel: +44 (0)1223 488 700 Fax: +44 (0)1223 488 701

www.transversal.com