When I sat down with our Executive Team and the Board in Q4 of last year to plan out our targets and goals for 2020 never in my wildest of dreams did I think we would also be dealing with a life-changing event for the majority of the year. Like every travel business, it has been a tough year, but having spent 27 years in this industry, I know it is incredibly resilient, and I do genuinely believe that it will bounce back during 2021. The demand we are currently seeing through the platform for 2021 departures is phenomenal, which only goes to support that view.
With the end of the year approaching, I want to take a minute to pause and reflect on the last 12 months. Even though for me and I am sure many of you it has been a year like no other, it would be wrong to not reflect on the positives that we have achieved and delivered as a business and with our customers.
Customer Service & Support
- In September, we rolled out new customer support Service Level Agreements (SLA) to our customers.
- We have seen a fantastic turnaround in our customer service and support offering, which has been demonstrated in our key metrics—improving our CSAT score from 3.3 to 4.3 (out of a possible 5).
- The team have improved their ability to receive feedback and act on this through our NPS survey process. In July, 80% of our customers said our customer service offering had improved. And this month we have launched our final customer service survey of the year so that we can continue to monitor and improve.
- Our investments in new supplier integrations and maintenance have received positive feedback.
- We have also invested in our cruise content team and processes to improve this service to our customers.
Product
- We continued to invest in our tours proposition and now have an MVP available.
- We have built and implemented our new cruise ‘shopping’ API in a JSON structure.
- We launched a suite of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tooling to enable customers to automate manual processes.
- We developed a Data Insights product, which will be ready for launch in early 2021.
AWS Migration
- We continued to invest in our AWS migration plans and expect to have every customer successfully migrated by the end of December.
People & Culture
- In March Stuart Cotterell joined the Traveltek family as the Chief Operating Officer, which completed the Executive Team line-up.
- During 2020 we have refreshed our company values, created our inaugural Culture Squad, and moved our office to central Glasgow within the heart of the technology community.
Operations
- Across operations, we have delivered the following key projects:
- Implemented a Problem Management process
- Improved stability across both data centre and cloud platforms
- Improved our internal change control process
- Developed a Technical Improvement Roadmap
- Improved visibility of project delivery
We also won for the 4th year running Europe’s Leading Travel Technology Provider 2020 at the World Travel Awards. An award which the team and I are very proud to have won, which would not have been possible without the tremendous support we have from our customers.
With the news of several vaccines becoming available, providing hope on the horizon for the travel industry, now is also the time to look forward. Let me now share with you our key areas of focus for 2021.
- Significant investment within our products, with the focus centred around:
- Our API – From Q1 onwards, we will build out our API to improve consistency and ease of use. This will be underpinned by investment in an improved supplier repository and cache. Our goal here is to improve speed, efficiency and scalability.
- Our core application (i.e. iSell/iBos) – From Q4, we will begin to address specific areas of the core application, again to improve speed and efficiency, but also reliability.
- We will continue to build on our customer service improvements, with enhanced infrastructure and further improved service levels.
- We will improve our reporting capabilities providing an ‘advanced reporting’ suite.
- We will also provide more automation tools (via RPA) to enable customers to improve productivity, quality and efficiencies.
I would also like to thank all our customers for their continued support throughout the year. We appreciate it has been a tough year, and we look forward to working with you in 2021.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Mal