MakeMyTrip increases agent efficiency by 3x using Freshchat

The online travel agency (OTA) industry is complicated and highly competitive. Loyalty is a rarity in this vertical. Customers chose you over a competitor even if it’s just for a few dollars less. In this crowded market, MakeMyTrip is India's leading online travel agencies, with nearly eight million visitors to their site every month.

 

“Experience wins customers over”

While selling holiday packages, MakeMyTrip felt that it needed to provide a far more personalised experience as compared to selling travel tickets. They needed a solution that can improve their conversions, customer satisfaction and agent efficiency.

“Experience wins customers over, and travel is all about experience in itself.”, says Aditya Priyadarshi, online product head for Holidays at MakeMyTrip. “Providing a great customer experience right from the time of booking makes you win customers. And we’re mindful that we are developing a relationship that should hopefully go beyond just one holiday. Giving a great experience from the start is key to building a long term relationship with our customers.”

Since the launch of their app on iOS and Android, mobile has emerged as the preferred booking medium for MakeMyTrip customers, accounting for over two-thirds of the site’s traffic. The challenge was to seamlessly convert ‘traffic to trips’.

They wanted to implement a messaging solution natively integrated within their mobile app to provide better customer assistance in the buying process of complicated travel products like holidays, honeymoon destinations.

Enter Freshchat.

 

"Freshchat enables our agents to provide more contextual and personalised assistance"

Previously, MMT handled customer queries as tickets. As much as tickets have their purpose and place in customer engagement, it lacks real-time ‘then and there’ assistance that live chat offers. MMT had an existing in-house front-end interface but did not have the time or resources to invest in building their own back-end agent experience to meet their needs. Given the volume of traffic they handle, MMT needed a quick and scalable solution.

“When visitors reached out to us on chat, we wanted to empower our agents to assist visitors with context and relevance. We needed a solution that was readily deployable to work and integrate with our sales workflow and at the same time help achieve better agent efficiency and customer satisfaction at scale. Freshchat’s flexible API made this happen for us.” - says Priyadarshi.

Agents are able to view customer activities such as timeline of pages visited, items added in cart right next to the conversation window, enabling them to assist with true context and more helpful support.

In addition to this, Adiya says that “Freshchat’s robust API allowed us to build a custom Smart Plug in-house that help us pass extensive customer and context specific data to the agent dashboard”. Having this vital info providing context in the right side pane of the conversation section is really helpful.

 

"We’ve seen a 3x upside in our agent efficiency"

For our Holiday product, Freshchat helps our team handle over 1000 conversations in parts of the day, with zero missed chats thanks to the Priority Inbox feature. Freshchat’s easy-to-navigate UI makes great impact on our efficiency in a daily basis, and helps our team ace conversations at scale. “Overall we’ve seen a 3x upside in our agent efficiency as compared to other channels”, says Aditya.

Another essential feature that has helped improve agent efficiency is Canned Responses. MMT created a repository of predefined responses that agents can access from the dashboard with shortcuts, leading to faster response times. The organization of conversations in the interface is an experience that’s quite unique to Freshchat. Efficiency improving features like canned responses are placed right within the conversation window making it one-click away from execution. You don’t have to go anywhere else.

 

"Our audience prefer chat over other channels"

Overall adding Freshchat as a sales channel has worked brilliantly with phone and email, says Aditya. This has had a snowball effect increasing our sales leads leading to higher conversion rates. By adding Freshchat we have really stepped on the gas increasing the number of conversations and engagement. Aditya says “Based on the extensive data we’ve seen, we can safely co-relate a higher conversion with engagement, engagement being measured in terms of number of user-agent exchanges, gross total number of chats and conversations.”

Aditya finished by saying the biggest benefit MakeMyTrip has received from Freshchat’s messaging solution is that it’s helping solve customer problems and doubts for very complex high ticket value products which are really difficult to solve through a conventional UI.