Back to Case studyHow Smartflo optimised a busy travel agency’s team communication
ShareHighlights
- Smartflo: Better resource utilisation with freedom from mundane manual tasks
- Unbiased performance appraisals with data on drivers’ productivity and punctuality
- Improved customer experiences from stronger adherence to the pickup and drop timings
- Ease of call management with a web-based communication setup
- Actionable business insights offered by reports on the daily-weekly-monthly trips
Introduction
The client company was founded in 2004 as a small-scale cab service for employee transportation between home and office. Today, it is a leading travel agency in Pune and serves several corporate offices in the city, offering bus transportation, shuttle services, cab pickups and drops, car rentals, airport transfers, and other services required by its clients.
With its 500-strong fleet of cars, vans, and buses, the company maintains a reliable infrastructure to provide timely, comfortable, and safe transportation to end-users.
The organisation aimed to streamline its fleet roster management by automating some of its manual processes and needed a system to check driver availability before assigning trips.
Smartflo’s pre-scheduled calling feature attracted the team’s attention, and they contacted us for more details on this cloud communication suite offered by Tata Tele Business Services (TTBS). A demonstration of Smartflo’s auto-call dialling feature persuaded the company of the service’s suitability, and they asked us to deploy the solution.
Business Challenges
The company had to employ a dedicated four-member team to ensure that the drivers in charge of the cabs and buses reported on time for their scheduled rides. During the night and early morning shifts, these associates had to be in the office and call the drivers to ensure round-the-clock punctuality of fleet operations.
This system had a few typical challenges:
- The process was tiring and cumbersome for the employees sending reminders and was also a non-value-added activity for the company.
- There was no way to get a documented confirmation from the drivers that they were reaching the assigned destinations.
- The company lacked a centralised mechanism to record the calls dialled to or received or missed from the drivers.
Such issues affected the team’s overall productivity and punctuality. There were high chances of delays in arriving at an assigned pickup point or initiating bus operations for corporate employees who needed to reach their office on time.
Summarily, the team needed a contact centre solution to schedule and automate its routine calls. A dedicated telephony service was also required to allow drivers to confirm their availability or send a message if they were unable to report for duty.
TTBS Solution
As a cloud communication suite, Smartflo brings a cluster of call management features to support contact centre operations for any business. The added automation facilities to systematise routine workflows helped the customer in this case.
We deployed Smartflo with 30 channels for the travel agency. The ‘intelligent assistant’ included in the platform addressed the different challenges that the team had been facing:
- Instead of dialling up each driver’s mobile number individually, the agency could now send a standard broadcast message as a wake-up call to all drivers so they could prepare for their trips.
- The administrative team could pre-schedule the wake-up calls through Smartflo. A retry option could be run every two minutes in the event of no response from the other end.
- While responding to wake-up calls, the drivers had to confirm their availability for a trip using Smartflo’s dual-tone multifrequency (DTMF) technology. This was simply a response to the message by pressing a certain key on their keypad. (Example - Press 1 to take the trip.)
- completing their assigned duties, the drivers could again call the contact centre and use the IVR and DTMF to inform about the pickup or drop they facilitated.
We set up Smartflo’s IVR in the local language to help the drivers clearly understand the instructions.
Besides streamlining the incoming and outgoing call flows with automation, Smartflo also helped the team gain deep insights into their service productivity. As all calls made to and received from the drivers were documented on Smartflo’s interface, the management team could trace the number of trips they completed with more accuracy.
On missing calls from drivers who wished to explain their absence from work or get more details on a trip, the executive could check the number on Smartflo’s dashboard and call them back.
After deploying Smartflo, the customer needed only one person to handle communication in any night/early morning shift.
An end-to-end SLA from TTBS also maintains an assured uptime of over 99% for the service.
With its web-based interface, Smartflo makes it simple to send broadcast messages and check IVR-DTMF responses on any device connected to the internet.
