Welcome to the August edition of Tektalk, and it’s been another extremely active few weeks in the world of travel. I’m writing this introduction from not so sunny Cornwall this week and, to be honest, wishing I had got on a plane to somewhere warmer! Like so many people I’ve met this week on my family travels who are dreaming of returning to overseas travel and warmer climates, as lovely as the UK coast is, in my book, it just doesn’t compete with a holiday abroad. It has been encouraging to read the recent news on cruise travel being given the green light to resume and the encouraging signs of scrapping the amber watch list and putting more countries on the green list. Clearly, the confusion around the traffic light system and admin to travel has prevented many from travelling this holiday season. The soaring amount of ‘pings’ has also affected so many people in the last few weeks, so let’s hope our vaccination programme and positive news on the US corridor reopening next month start to rebuild much-needed confidence. Traveltek also had a call with ABTA to voice our disappointment in the underwhelming support we feel that ABTA has given to our agents to get them a much-needed voice to campaign for sector-specific financial support, and we would welcome any further support for agents, so we have been keenly watching the progress on this subject.
We have continued our recruitment drive at pace and kept you all up to date on this in the last few editions of Tektalk. I’m delighted to say that we have now nearly completed our development recruitment, and we have filled our last few remaining commercial roles. We will, of course, introduce you to our new account manager in Hayley’s team, who is due to start in September and our new digital marketing manager, who is joining later in August. Sadly this month, we will also be saying goodbye to Lindsay Miller, our Head of Marketing who is leaving the travel industry to join a B2B technology recruitment company, Lindsay has done a sterling job in her time with Traveltek, and we wish her the very best of luck with her next challenge.
Our V2 development is continuing well with our first development goal on target for the end of August, which is an internal goal we have set ourselves. We have 2 product webinars on 8th and 9th September, and we would welcome all customers to join one of these sessions for an update and for your chance to ask questions. We are extremely keen to get as many customers involved as possible in giving feedback for our product development. So far, the work has mainly been around architecture and tooling, so we aim to start customer engagement in October. Please don’t worry about not being included, as we will engage with all customers and ensure we have a mechanism for everyone to contribute. We would encourage your technical teams also to attend these product webinars too.
We continue to manage our system performance, and I’m delighted to share that, yet again in July, we have achieved our 80% SLA goal for time to resolution on our tickets. In July, 491 tickets were raised, and we resolved 547 support and maintenance tickets. Last month we said we would tackle the backlog, and we have successfully made progress here on key tickets. System stability – version 1.0 = 100%, and version 1.5 = 99.66% for July – continues to be a key focus and will be for the foreseeable future. In addition, we continue to review areas where prevention work can be completed in our maintenance team.
We continue to place a large emphasis on customer service and would really encourage you and your staff to rate our service in Jira as you close the tickets. Our CSAT score in July was 4.42 out of 5. Following a review of the change request tickets, we have closed many of these and captured this information as feedback for the rebuild of our V2 product.
Thank you to everyone who took the time to complete our NPS survey. We read every review and score and share the overall results with all of our customers in our September edition of Tektalk and use this information to improve our communication and customer service.
If you have any questions about anything mentioned in this month’s Tektalk, please do not hesitate to contact your account manager, who will be happy to help.
As always, thank you for your continued support and stay safe.