The most challenging period businesses faced in recent years was the pandemic one. It has had a severe impact on tourism, making companies change their approach to commercial activities. Walks, the tours & activities industry leader, has managed to survive difficult times and tailor its business to the new normal. Scroll down to discover how its cooperation with WOW24-7 helped the company retain an audience and engage new enthusiastic travellers.
Walks is an international travel company allowing people to look at trips from a different angle. For ten years, it has been sharing its core values by organizing walks in 14 of the most beautiful cities, such as Paris, New York, London, and Rome.
Walks’ philosophy became so fascinating to the world that reputable media like New York Times, USA Today, The Telegraph, etc., didn’t stop writing about it.
Before the pandemic, Walks actively developed its business, but external circumstances forced it to slow down and build strength before a breakthrough.
Quarantine became a sort of “vacation” for the tourism sector, after which it was necessary to move at a light speed. Among other things, it was essential for Walks to maintain its seamless communication with clients.
Earlier, the company had its in-house customer support team providing quality services. Its agents advised tourists, helped arrange tours, etc. The system was well-designed, but it has a few core cons: limited flexibility and comparatively high costs.
After the pandemic, Walk’s managers decided to upgrade the process, eliminating the above drawbacks. They needed to select responsible English-speaking agents for a dedicated team to replace their internal ones. WOW24-7 helped the client cover this issue to achieve results faster.
The company had two scenarios on how to set up customer support service. They could build an in-house team again or choose a new way and involve a dedicated team. Walks preferred the last option.
Walks needed a powerful dedicated team consisting of 7 highly skilled agents. This approach would help the company communicate with its clients on the radar. We spent about 6 weeks of preparation before launching the service.
During the first 4 weeks, WOW24-7 specialists conducted the careful selection of the future agents. Walks’ managers had an opportunity to interview and choose the most talented and motivated people.
WOW24-7 took care of organizing the proper onboarding of agents, giving Walks more time to deal with higher priority tasks. The last 2 weeks were devoted to the end-to-end training. Agents dug deeper into the client’s commercial offering, peculiarities of business processes, and subtleties of used software.
The crisis has allowed Walks to streamline its communication process with customers to retain and engage them. We have already helped the company expand the dedicated team by 40% during our long-term cooperation and have ambitious plans to grow it by 20% this year.
The dedicated team has been communicating with the Walks customers via a live chat system, emails, and other channels for a year. Agents use several software solutions, including Salesforce, to provide high-quality support.
