Booking travel can be stressful for anyone—but imagine booking travel for 64 college basketball teams of more than a dozen athletes a piece with only a few days lead time. That’s hundreds of flights to coordinate and millions of March Madness fans counting on the teams to arrive at their tournament cities in time for tipoff.
STM, one of the top 25 travel management companies in the industry, is no stranger to this scenario. In addition to serving as the NCAA’s official travel partner, they work with 100+ corporate, collegiate, and athletic clients. To ensure a positive customer experience for the large volume of travelers who leverage their services every day, STM recognized there was a big opportunity to improve upon their booking tools and services based on traveler feedback.
And that’s exactly what STM set out to do. To identify specific areas for improvement, Account Specialist Taylor Hake and her team launched SurveyMonkey CX to get input not only from the travel managers, but also from the individual travelers who interact with their tools and agents every day.
Customer feedback drives meaningful improvements
STM has long prided itself on bringing innovative ideas to life through its traveler-centric solutions. And with two proprietary booking tools and a host of top-rated travel agents on its roster, the travel company is succeeding.
But STM faced a challenge. Without the ability to store individual travelers’ email addresses within their CRM, it took 20+ hours each month for the team to manually pull a report of travelers from each client; filter by agent; manually cross-reference with a list of travelers who had already been surveyed to avoid burdening frequent travelers with multiple surveys; and upload the resulting email list to the survey platform. This lengthy process meant they were only able to realistically target travelers from a few client organizations per month.
To gather the client feedback they needed to make meaningful product and service changes based on real customer needs, STM turned to SurveyMonkey CX. Today, the process of collecting, analyzing, and sharing customer insights is streamlined and effective.
As soon a traveler books a trip with one of STM’s agents or online booking tools, an automated email is triggered containing a SurveyMonkey CX survey. Additionally, clients and travel arrangers receive an annual relational survey to get their input and a gauge on their satisfaction with the service.
Sharing customer insights widely means more visibility and more opportunities to take action
In addition to their need for a more automated way to run surveys to a large and ever-changing group of travelers, STM also needed to give their CEO visibility into the performance and progress of each branch.
With SurveyMonkey CX, Hake is able to keep the leadership team in the loop by sending out weekly and monthly NPS® reports that highlight how agents and the online booking tools are doing. Plus, executives can access and filter the data at any time via the SurveyMonkey CX platform to track performance.
With more insights at their fingertips than was ever available before, STM is empowered to take meaningful actions and identify and address any issues right away based on customer feedback. Today, Account Managers actively take responses back to travel managers so they can take steps to improve traveler education and review additional training opportunities. As a result, they’ve seen their NPS increase from the mid-50s to an impressive all-time high of +71—a 25% lift.
As the team continues to innovate and develop new products in the coming months, they can look to customer feedback to help guide the product design.
Ready to boost your customer experience?
Collect, understand, and take action on customer feedback using our turn-key NPS solution, SurveyMonkey CX.
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