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Delta Air Lines, Atlanta, GA

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2012, Click to Enter The 2014 American Business Awards

Company: Delta Air Lines, Atlanta, GA
Company Description: Delta Air Lines serves more than 160 million customers each year. With its unsurpassed global network, Delta and the Delta Connection® carriers offer service to more than 330 destinations in 65 countries on six continents. The Reservation Sales and Customer Care division handles an average of 50 million customer contacts each year and generates approximately $2B in annual revenue.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Contact Center of the Year (Over 100 Seats) - All Other Industries

Nomination Title: Delta Air Lines Contact Center of the Year Over 100 Seats

Tell the story about what this nominated contact center achieved since the beginning of July 2013 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

Our journey to 2015 has proved both challenging and rewarding, with many milestones to mark our progress in elevating the customer experience. That progress is perhaps best demonstrated by our achievement of J.D. Power Call Center Certification and our consistently climbing customer satisfaction rankings.

Those rankings are a testament to the dedicated service we provide, and below is just a glimpse of the many tactics we’ve employed since July 2013 to ensure a continuous climb in customer satisfaction. You’ll also find evidence of our efforts to improve efficiency and boost employee morale, the benefits of which are shared by employees and customers alike:

With only nine call centers in the U.S. having ever been J.D. Power Call Center Certified, achieving this distinction is an in-depth and rigorous process that evaluates every aspect of our business based on J.D. Power’s concepts of superior customer service.

• To accomplish this, we began laying the groundwork in 2013, when J.D. Power auditors conducted an initial Customer Satisfaction Survey and Operational Performance Assessment (OPA).

• By July, every facet of our organization was engaged and working to collect documentation and map out processes in preparation for subsequent OPA exercises.

• In November, after thorough auditing, the announcement was made that we had become the first airline to ever achieve J.D. Power Call Center Certification for Premium Sales and Service.

In addition to Certification, we focused heavily on improving the customer experience and realizing tangible results that tell the story of our customers’ perception.

• In early 2014, we introduced the concept of “Brand Advocates” as the way we measure Post Call Surveys. Brand Advocate Scores, which measure the likelihood of customers to recommend Delta, improved by 15% since inception, after a heavy focus throughout the year on going above and beyond to turn customers into advocates.

• We continued our focus on achieving record-setting rankings in Department of Transportation complaint performance. By March, we were #1 in complaints for our Refunds department, and as of November, Delta is ranked number 2 amongst its peers for all complaints company-wide.

• We also reduced complaints to our Customer Care department by 10% month over month, as of September 2014.

• This year we set out to significantly improve the travel experience for our customers with disabilities, as well as unaccompanied minors. We spearheaded cross-divisional efforts to treat these customers as “VIPs.” As of September, disability related complaints were down nearly 14%
over the same period from previous year.

• Our Social Media volume for @DeltaAssist increased, and we turned negative experiences into positive outcomes over 50% more year over year.

• We played a key role in supporting customers through the rollout of the new 2015 SkyMiles Program that changed the way frequent fliers earn and redeem miles.

• More enhancements were implemented for our world-class VIPER rebooking system, increasing the take rate for automated rebooking to 43% for March-August, a period of significantly high summer traffic.

• We increased customer satisfaction scores with new enhancements to our Natural Language Interactive Voice Response Unit (by 1.4 points for essential customers). Now, many customers receive a personalized experience and proactive flight notifications when dialing in to Delta.

We also implemented changes for our workforce to improve operations and ensure specialists are equipped to take great care of customers.

• The Reservations Automation Flight Academy was launched to provide thorough training for back office Project Managers.

• We introduced the Lift & Learn program, providing more concentrated coaching opportunities to specialists not currently meeting key customer satisfaction metrics.

• A call library was established featuring recordings that best depict the characteristics of our brand.

With numerous more endeavors that would help depict our progress, these mere highlights only scratch the surface of all we’ve accomplished. And our efforts have not been in vain, for our metrics and our accolades tell the story. And we humbly press forward with our backpacks on, paving the way for many great things to come!

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