Case study

Travel Counsellors streamlines customer communicationsHP Exstream delivers a better customer experience while reducing workload and cost

IndustryTravel and tourism

ObjectiveEstablish the company’s image for highly personalised, professional services and reflect this in redesigned customer communications

ApproachResearched the market for customer communication management solutions and saw demonstrations from a shortlist of leading vendors

IT matters• Automates labour-intensive design processes

and reduces template numbers to increase staff productivity

• Enables designs to be stored and reused to further reduce document development times

• Supports a wide variety of file formats and output systems, including a dozen electronic formats

Business matters• Makes documents more attractive, readable and

informative to improve customer experience

• Co-ordinates design to underline Travel Counsellors’ corporate image

• Reduces time to market for document changes and eliminates the cost of external developers

“We felt that HP Exstream would do everything that we needed. It would also do a lot of things that we hadn’t realised that we needed.” – Paul Speakman, IT director, Travel Counsellors

Making the vision a reality Fast growing UK and international travel company Travel Counsellors takes pride in the highly personalised service offered by its home-based franchisees. When it decided to underline this image with a rebrand it also needed to improve its documentation. The HP Exstream customer communication management platform was chosen to transform this vision into a workable reality.

Case study | Travel Counsellors

Challenge

Rebranding exercise Award-winning company Travel Counsellors was founded in 1994 and provides holiday and corporate travel packages for 450,000 customers. Its 1,300 self-employed Travel Counsellors are experienced travel-trade professionals who work from home on a franchise basis.

Headquartered in Bolton, this is a fast growing company with a business model that has been replicated in Ireland, The Netherlands, Australia, South Africa, Canada and Dubai. A major success factor is the high level of back-office support that homeworkers receive from a network of experienced staff including administration, IT, marketing and commercial. Centralised systems and support leave them free to build close relationships with their customers and the result is a concierge-style, highly personalised service.

“We take pride in good customer service. Our business model is based on building relationships and creating value through the bespoke 24/7 service our agents provide, as opposed to the internet’s transactional price drive model,” says Paul Speakman, IT director with Travel Counsellors.

Customer communications play a crucial role in the operation. When agents receive an inquiry, they have access to a host of suppliers’ products and can use the company’s in-house dynamic packaging system Phenix.

This system allows the agent to tailor-make itineraries from a wide range of directly contracted products, giving them control of their earnings whilst getting the most competitive deal for the customer. Phenix manages all accounting and generates the necessary customer communications such as quotations, booking confirmations, itineraries, vouchers, receipts, invoices and payment reminders.

These communications are the company’s main conduit to its customers and Travel Counsellors felt that they could be improved even further.

“As we continue to expand and grow our customer base we wanted to develop our communications to reflect our brand values,” explains Speakman. “The design of our customer communications was inconsistent in places. Some information was repeated and they were produced using Microsoft® Reporting Services which was not very flexible. It didn’t allow us to make the kind of professional communications we wanted and it was hard to manage, requiring a developer whenever changes were needed.”

Travel Counsellors embarked on a rebranding exercise. It employed an external consultant to redesign the communications with a common look and feel and used its own PR department to re-jig the words, making them easier to read and understand.

The vision was set, but the company needed a way to make it work in reality.

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Case study | Travel Counsellors

Solution

New document designsTravel Counsellors’ analyst project manager, Victoria Ogden, researched customer communications management solutions on the Internet and compiled a shortlist of possible solutions that were called in for demonstration.

One of these was the multi-channel Customer Communication Management (CCM) solution, HP Exstream.

“HP Exstream ticked all our boxes,” says Speakman. “It was regarded as the best on the market and featured high in analyst rankings.”

HP Exstream offers a single platform that seamlessly supports on-demand and interactive document applications of all types. Designed to fit into any IT environment, it can directly access structured and unstructured systems from almost any data source. Highly individual communications can then be output through many channels including print and email, SMS, social media, Internet, email and fax.

Travel Counsellors’ own lead developer managed a straightforward implementation of HP Exstream, supported by some conference calls with HP specialists, and the installation was followed by a three day training workshop. HP Exstream is set up to draw information from the database behind the Phenix system to incorporate it into the new communication designs.

Benefits

Professional veneerHP Exstream has given Travel Counsellors a firm foundation for ongoing improvement of its customer communication management.

A small team has started using the solution purely in the UK with output limited to colour and mono versions in PDF format for print or email. Typical monthly figures show that HP Exstream generates 32,000 documents a month with over 700 variables and these figures are purely for its UK holiday business, excluding business travel.

“At the moment we are basing the documents on the information we have from the bookings, with limited personalisation but we are looking to increase the level of personalisation in later phases,” adds Speakman. “The new system also allows our Travel Counsellors to theme their documents with suitable images for such things as beach holidays, ski trips or cruises.

“The documents have become a lot more professional and we have had good feedback from both our agents and customers. Using HP Exstream has allowed us to be more flexible and create designs that would not have been possible with the old system. We are also able to fix issues much more quickly. With the old system we needed the developer to make any changes but that is no longer the case so we can turn changes around much more quickly, which is going to improve the quality of the documents we send out.”

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32,000 documents a month and more to come

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Case study | Travel Counsellors

Customer solution at a glance

Software• HP Exstream

© Copyright 2014 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

Microsoft is a U.S. registered trademark of the Microsoft group of companies.

4AA5-0440EEW, March 2014

Travel Counsellors’ IT team has been pleased with the service provided by the HP Exstream team who, they say are always ‘on the ball’ with feedback, problem solving or issuing new versions.

Reduced complexityUsing HP Exstream has enabled Travel Counsellors to reduce the complexity of communication production by consolidating the number of templates it uses and condensing two or three communications into one. The 37 templates that were used in the UK have been reduced to 25 and it is hoped that these reductions will be replicated in the other six territories.

“ Now our communications are designed to look like a family of documents, reflecting our relational and highly personal business model.” – Victoria Ogden, analyst project manager, Travel Counsellors

“Making changes to documents is a lot quicker than it was previously,” explains Victoria Ogden. “We will be able to have several countries on the same templates and that will save a lot of time. They are also modular so if, for example, we decide to change our logo we just do it in one place rather than 50 places.”

As well as extending the use of HP Exstream to its operations in other countries, Travel Counsellors also plans to take advantage of different digital delivery methods for electronic communications.

“Traditionally we have run a print and post exercise but with HP Exstream, we’re moving away from that to become more digital,” says Speakman. “Customers expect that now and by increasingly using electronic channels means, we will be able to deliver their documents sooner. Our customer communications now look more professional and are clearer to understand. It’s all about building the brand and improving the customer experience.”

Learn more at hp.com/exstream