Flight Centre Travel Group has updated its customer experience (CX) and improved operational efficiencies with Nintex's K2 Cloud.

Flight Centre Travel Group, with a sizable global sales network, received an overwhelming number of cancellation requests in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The company needed to find a fast and more efficient way to support its customers beyond their 800-number especially when the US and Canada borders were initially closed this year.

The organisation turned to K2 Cloud to develop and launch a digital form process that automatically routes changes to one centralised expertise-based Flight Centre team armed with all the necessary tools and policies to expedite changes with improved customer experience.

To date, the form has been leveraged more than 60,000 times which has helped reduce customer hold times and potential frustrations, the company states.

Nintex chief customer officer Josh Waldo says, "The travel industry as a whole quickly pivoted how it operates and responds to cancellations and restrictions brought on by the pandemic.

"By automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks with easy-to-use and powerful digital process automation software like K2 Cloud, the Flight Centre Travel Group immediately went digital and provided its corporate travelers with a better experience."

To improve its corporate travel customer experience, the Flight Centre Travel Group modernised its operations to drive more consistency and transparency across its processes.

Previously, like most businesses, information was tracked and shared across spreadsheets, forms, and third-party tools, with no single source of truth.

This resulted in team members spending time managing repetitive, complex processes that delayed great customer experience, according to the company.

FCM Travel Solutions global head of operations Shaun Clear says, "We wanted to improve process efficiency across the organisation.

"We needed a consistent, streamlined way of accurately capturing all information in a shareable way in order to create greater standardisation and transparency.

"K2 Cloud has given us the ability to quickly and swiftly address a number of operational issues helping us focus on the most important piece of our business and the reason we exist: our travel customers."

The company previously used internal technology called ‘HUB' to build corporate travel client sites and also securely store individual traveler profiles including frequent flyer information, seat and meal preferences, credit card numbers, and identification documents.

While this process worked for the traveler, it was challenging for the Flight Centre Travel Group team to build and maintain as it required a 100% manual process to build all new sites, the company states.

Flight Centre Travel Group head of digital workplace Nick Williams says, "For instance, we currently have one customer that needs 400 sites, which is an immense undertaking when one build typically takes about 30 - 45 minutes.

"To keep up with demand we needed to add an intelligent automation layer to the process which is why we decided to use K2 Software.

"With K2 Cloud we can collect customer information and configure it with RPA to automatically build sites with no human oversight.

"This has been truly transformative for the team and helps us focus on more strategic projects like improving our customer experience and future-proofing our business."