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 world’s
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
Transversal’s 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
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
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 world’s largest leisure travel companies. Carnival UK’s brands
include Cunard Line, P&O Cruises, Princess Cruises and Seabourn.
Carnival UK’s vision is to be “the most spectacularly successful
cruise company in Britain”.
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, Transversal’s 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 don’t 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.
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 UK’s overall
customer services operation and is queried 40,000 50,000 times every month.
Since its implementation, the knowledgebase
has been queried 141,000 times by Carnival UK’s
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.
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, it’s 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