April 25 2008 London:  One of the UK’s latest travel agents, Monster Travel, will differentiate itself by the strength of its call centre team and using intelligent telephony that returns callers to their usual agent whenever possible. The caller-focussed contact centre is based on ContactWorld from Hosted Centre provider, NewVoiceMedia. By treating callers as individuals and valued customers, rather than just the next person in the queue, Monster Travel intends to become branded as “My Travel Agent of Choice”.

“It’s never easy to start a new company, especially one entering the highly competitive travel industry where costs of entry are high, but margins are tight”, said Monster Travel Managing Director, David Hawke. “I anticipate that only 30-40% of our business will be taken over the web, so the contact centre and its experienced staff play will play a vital role in our strategy. Our customers often call several times before deciding on a trip, and our personalised customer service will speed up the process at every stage.”

Monster Travel is using a Hosted Contact Centre from NewVoiceMedia. Hosting allows the company to set-up in a matter of weeks and eliminates the need for the CapEx intensive investments traditionally required by customer premise equipment. Eliminating upfront investment, and being able to scale the solution to the number of agents as the company grows means that the costs are matched to the actual business needs. Ideal for a start-up, Monster Travel expects to run 50 concurrent agents within a matter of weeks.

Callers to Monster Travel will experience an individual caller treatment that can recognise VIPs or customers thought to be at the point of making an order and route them to the agent they last spoke to. Before the call is placed the caller could be offered a 10 second PhoneAd that would cross sell travel insurance if it is relevant, and the agent screen will be popped with all the known call history for that caller. Hawke reports that being able to say ‘Hello again Mr Smith, how was your ski holiday in Courcheval?’ is much more personal way of doing business. Should the caller wish to make a payment then a fully automated process is used to collect the credit card details. This Payment Card Industry compliant process not only improves security, it releases the agent 30-40 seconds earlier to wrap-up and prepare for the next call. All of which adds to overall call centre efficiency and ultimately the bottom line.

According to David Hawke, “The team at NewVoiceMedia have listened carefully to our vision and configured an industry-leading platform that gives us a real competitive edge.”  NewVoiceMedia CEO, Jonathan Grant concluded “The Hosted Contact Centre empowers business of all shapes and sizes to set-up more cost effectively and to compete more efficiently. We very much look forward to working with Monster Travel to help them achieve their targets over the coming months.”