CruiseDirect.com - Customer Service Department of the Year
Company: CruiseDirect.com, Morristown, NJ
Company Description: CruiseDirect.com is the worlds highest rated online cruise travel agency. Founded in 2001 by our President, John Maguire, CruiseDirect.com has assisted over half a million travelers book cruise vacations.
Nomination Category: Customer Service Department Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Department of the Year - Leisure & Tourism
Nomination Title: CruiseDirect.com
Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, explaining the achievement since July 1, 2018 of the nominated customer service organization, OR a written essay of up to 650 words describing the same? (Choose one): An essay/case study of up to 650 words
For 15 years, over 50,000 clients have trusted CruiseDirect.com and our famous customer service to book cruise getaways. We’re also proud to say that more than 33 million unique visitors have taken a tour of our website.
The secret to our success is that we’re a client-driven company — our entire process is focused on our customers’ happiness. To make that happen, we keep our Customer Service Team happy, because we believe that happy staff will create happy customers. Our rich, inspiring port, cruise, cruise line, and ship content along with an intuitive knowledgebase and an expert team of Advisors available at a moment’s notice via phone, chat or text makes finding the right cruise at the best price a breeze.
Our clients are polled after every phone, email, text and call and results are sent directly to management who act on the rating to make immediate improvements to our service. To balance the scales, our employees anonymously rate management by providing real and honest feedback. As a result, we’ve achieved great percentiles: we’re in the 84th percentile in engagement; 90th in recognition; and 92nd in happiness among over 100 companies that also use this engagement tool.
At CruiseDirect.com, we’re thrilled have the lowest agent turnover rates in our industry. How do we achieve this? Besides fostering team happiness, we give our employees the ability to work from home; host monthly team-building events and incentives; and provide the latest technologies to make work easier and more productive. Although our team members are located on three continents in 7 countries, our collaborative tools and Facebook-like social media platform allows team members to develop close relationships and form bonds than are stronger than those of our nearest competitors.
Our people are the heart of our business. All team member at CruiseDirect.com are experts having achieved our supplier’s and our industries highest levels of certification. The certifications are supplemented through weekly training with our partners to maintain the latest industry knowledge.
By applying continuous improvement strategies, we never stop striving to improve our best in class customer satisfaction scores. To make this possible we maintain open communication based on our clients preferences. Any poorly rated interactions are automatically and immediately escalated for efficient resolution 18 hours per day, 365 days per year.
Our team regularly exceeds our customer’s expectations by providing faster than expected response times. To do this, we empower our employees with supercharged tools, such as AnswerBot, which answers questions within milliseconds. If the question is not answered, a ticket is created, and a team member responds promptly. We communicate with customers in their native language by using translation tools in our email and chat systems. Special texting software allows us to reach our customers by SMS text message for important updates, as well.
Travel is a rapidly changing, temperamental industry. Despite the challenges, we’ve consistently achieved a customer satisfaction rate over 95% — even after facing industry-wide setbacks, including overnight governmental restrictions on travel to Cuba in 2019, in addition to a very active hurricane season, which caused major itinerary changes. We’re proud to have earned such high approval from our customers, and a key contributor to this success has been our ability to keep our customers informed by employing an omni-channel approach to communication.
How We Have Moved the Needle Since 2018:
-Our Customer Satisfaction Rating shot up from 90.50% to 95.2%
-We improved the first-reply time of our average email by a speedy 14%
-We were proud to maintain an A+ grading with the BBB, the absolute highest in the industry
-We were thrilled to score 4.6/5 or higher reviews on all the top review websites such as SiteJabber, TrustPilot, Reseller Ratings, and Facebook Reviews, another industry watermark
-We reduced our dropped/missed chats by a whopping 32%
-We eliminated dropped/missed calls by a healthy 26%