Key Travel

With Salesforce, we can help more organisations use travel as a force for good.”

- David Burns, CTO, Key Travel
 
584 employees
Salesforce customer since 2014

33%

increase in agent productivity

 
 

Key Travel helps volunteers reach more underserved communities with Salesforce

Amy is passionate about building a sustainable future, which is why she volunteered to support a Raleigh International project in Nepal to improve access to water and sanitation for local communities. When Nepal announced it was closing its borders due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Key Travel had just 72 hours to get Amy and 30 other young volunteers home safely.

This challenge wasn’t unique to Raleigh International and its volunteers. Hundreds of medics, teachers, and NGO leaders all over the world suddenly needed Key Travel’s help to return to their home countries. “We had to react incredibly quickly - and at scale,” said David Burns, Key Travel’s CTO. “With Salesforce, we were able to reduce the complexity of repatriating more than 400 people under massive time constraints.”

 

With Salesforce, we were able to reduce the complexity of repatriating more than 400 people under massive time constraints”

- David Burns, CTO, Key Travel

Key Travel simplifies one million trips every year.

Reducing complexity is at the heart of Key Travel’s mission; it specialises in simplifying travel for the humanitarian, faith, and education sectors. The travel management company supports nearly 2,000 customers in 54 countries and arranges around one million trips per year. But Key Travel does more than just book transport and accommodation; it advises on customs rules, assists with visa applications, and offers tracking services for travellers.

“Our customers are committed to supporting, healing, and educating people around the world, and that often means travelling to remote and conflict-torn locations,” explained Burns. “We want to support their missions by anticipating their unique needs and providing tailored travel experiences.”

Helping volunteers catch the last flight home.

The COVID-19 pandemic intensified the need for personalised travel arrangements like never before. “The world was closing down rapidly, and people were running out of options,” said Burns. “We were already dealing with a surge in requests due to the collapse of a regional airline and then COVID-19 hit.” In March 2020, the number of calls handled by Key Travel increased eight fold compared with the same period the previous year. And it wasn’t just volumes that changed; the complexity and variety of queries also increased.

It was the challenge of a lifetime for Key Travel’s 600-strong team. And Service Cloud helped them mount an amazing response at a time when everyone’s work routine had been turned upside down. “Within 24 hours, all our staff were set up to work from home,” explained Burns. “Salesforce helped to make this transition much easier and quicker; we didn’t miss a beat.”

As a result, Key Travel’s consultants were able to continue to use the information and customer insights captured in Service Cloud to quickly respond to the COVID-19 challenge and pivot to meet customers’ needs. “With Service Cloud, our consultants could see which repatriation efforts had already been explored, which saved valuable time,” said Burns. “Without that agility or visibility, customers could have missed what was potentially the last plane out of a country.”

Smarter processes increase employee productivity and customer service levels.

Providing a fast response has always been a priority for Key Travel - its customers often need to travel at short notice in response to a disaster, such as an earthquake or flood. With Salesforce, consultants can capture inquiry details from a customer in just four minutes instead of 20, which has helped to increase their productivity by a third.

“Richer insights have enabled us to optimise our contact centre processes to such an extent that service levels have improved by 50%,” explained Burns. “With Service Cloud, we can allocate resources and track performance more effectively, which means we can focus more time on developing our people and processes.”

Implementing centralised customer records, real-time dashboards, and intelligent call routing with computer telephony integration, were key to achieving these efficiency and quality gains. “With Service Cloud, we have much better visibility of overall demand as well as individual customer’s trips and preferences,” said Burns. “This helps us identify new ways to remove complexity and add value, for example by negotiating discounts or setting up air bridges.”

Key Travel’s consultants can also capture feedback from customers on recent trips and share destination insights with other travellers, which can help to ensure a more seamless travel experience.

Boosting customer satisfaction through continuous improvement.

Capturing customer feedback is important to Key Travel. It doesn’t just want to provide a fast response; it wants to provide a compassionate and relevant service. “We carry out a range of surveys and reviews to help us learn how we can improve,” said Burns. Key Travel has already clocked up an impressive improvement in customer satisfaction: its NPS score increased by four points within two months of implementing Service Cloud.

By automating the distribution and collation of NPS surveys in Service Cloud, its leadership team will gain a better insight into performance at key points in the customer relationship. An automated approach also makes it easier for Key Travel to measure and map service quality, which helps it evaluate the success of new products and enhancements to existing customer services.

Driving growth with greater visibility.

At the same time as implementing Service Cloud, Key Travel rebooted its use of Sales Cloud by migrating to the Lightning Experience. As well as capturing details of specific requests and interactions, account managers can also log insights and ideas from review meetings, which helps to drive greater collaboration and transparency with customers. “Our sales and leadership teams now have better visibility of the overall pipeline and the progress of individual opportunities,” commented Burns.

Key Travel also wants to empower its customers by giving them greater visibility and control of their trips and interactions. It already provides alerts about travel changes or delays via a mobile app - which can automatically raise a case in Service Cloud - and plans to introduce real-time tracking of queries via Community Cloud as well as live chat. “With Salesforce, we can add new capabilities within days instead of months,” said Burns. “It helps us adapt to our customers’ changing needs and grow our services.”

Using travel as a force for good.

Colleagues within IT and business functions use Trailhead to develop their skills, share best practices, and pursue new ideas. And Key Travel is never short of ideas. It plans to implement a trailblazing integration between Salesforce and Amadeus, one of the world’s largest travel booking platforms, to link customer reservations with case records.

By continuing to innovate and improve, Key Travel will be able to help more humanitarian, faith, and education organisations reach more communities and countries where they can make a real difference. “With Salesforce, we can provide a more compassionate and responsive service and help more organisations use travel as a force for good,” said Burns.

 
 

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