Haven Holidays has seen a 5% uplift in sales after putting answers to its customers’ routine questions online.

As a result of the move, the UK holiday company has freed up the time of its customer service team, making them available to answer sales calls. That gave the company’s team of more than 65 call centre agents more time to talk to customers, resulting 5% increase in contact centre conversion of calls to sales. At the same time, inbound emails have reduced by 46%.

The improvement came after Haven introduced technology from Eptica. Its email management software helped customer service staff to deal with email enquiries more quickly, while its self-service software provided a customer help section with automatic answers to most routine questions.

That has meant only 4.8% of online self-service users have needed to follow up with an email enquiry. From the date the system was implemented in January 2010 to the end of April 2010, email enquiries were down to 12,000, compared with 24,000 for the same period last year. But sales increased at the same time.

Sean Power, Sales Manager at Haven Holidays said: “We’ve improved customer experience, reduced inbound emails by 46% and our agents are consequently able to spend more time helping customers pick the best holiday option for them which in turn has increased our sales conversion rates by 5%.”

Dee Roche, European marketing manager for Eptica, said: “The purpose of web-based customer service software is to improve online customer experience and reduce the strain placed upon contact centres and if it’s overly complicated it only serves to do the opposite.”

Haven Holidays has 35 Holiday Parks around the UK and has been operating for more than 40 years.

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