HotelTonight Drives Improved Customer Experience with Talkdesk and Zendesk

Travelers who want to book a hotel room online have many options. However, online travel agency HotelTonight has differentiated themselves from the competition by providing world-class customer service. Their approach to providing hotel rooms at a discounted rate, especially for last-minute accommodations, has resulted in fast growth and recognition from leading publications such as Business Insider and the Washington Post.

What is HotelTonights’ special recipe for administering world-class customer service? We turned to Emily Donohoe, HotelTonight Training Specialist, to learn more. We discovered that HotelTonight’s customer service organization is unique because their contact center agents are 100% remote. When they began looking for a new contact center platform, they needed one that worked with their global, remote workforce and scaled with their fast-growing business.

HotelTonight chose Talkdesk as their customer experience solution in 2017. Since implementing Talkdesk, the biggest benefit has been improved customer service. In addition, HotelTonight has been able to quickly and easily train new agents, have greater insight into service levels and have a user-friendly solution that’s easy for agents to learn and use.

HotelTonight recently integrated Talkdesk with Zendesk, which provides a seamless integration that allows agents to work from one unified application. By integrating Talkdesk with Zendesk, agents have more personal insight about the customers who are calling, which not only improves customer service but also speeds up the call. Talkdesk with Zendesk helps agents be more efficient and productive.

“This has actually been a game changer for our customer experience team being able to have a ticket created automatically when they answer an inbound call. This creates obviously a higher efficiency but also an improved customer experience. We are able to answer their inquiries without having to ask a lot of questions. And it also just creates a better employee experience,” explains Emily Donohoe, Training Specialist for HotelTonight.

HotelTonight’s contact center is 100% remote, and they have agents throughout the United States, Europe and Mexico. They provide support 24 hours a day in the language their customers need. “Talkdesk is a great fit for HotelTonight because it works well with remote teams. As a training specialist when I’m onboarding new hires I can have them download, register and learn how to use the program within an hour, and then they are able to take calls. So from 3000 miles away I’m in Seattle training someone in Florida and it’s so seamless to get them on the phone,” explains Donohoe.

HotelTonight makes it a priority to leverage reporting and analytics to provide insights to help improve customer service. “Implementing Talkdesk at HotelTonight has helped us have greater insight into the service level on even an hourly basis. It makes it so easy for our team to improve our service level at a macro level, so then we are able to improve. Even in our busy season in the summer we are able to deliver on service level and get customers’ questions answered quickly,” says Donohoe.

“My overall experience with Talkdesk has been that it is user-friendly. As a training specialist that is the most important feature for me. It is so comforting to know that when our new hires come aboard they will be able to use our most important tool without having to jump through hoops and without any issues really. It is very seamless,” concludes Donohoe.

Want to learn more:

• Watch the HotelTonight video testimonial
• Learn how Talkdesk can help with your contact center needs