How Holiday Inn and Cresta partnered to boost revenue and improve agent experience

About

Holiday Inn Club Vacations is a resort, real estate and travel company with a mission to be the most loved brand in family travel. With 28 resorts in top travel destinations across the US, fostering Customer Obsession is a key strategic focus to grow their customer base and business.

Challenges

With the team growing and some agents working remotely, Holiday Inn managers needed better visibility into their agents’ conversations to effectively boost performance. Their legacy tools required an external request process to get call recordings; this lengthy process meant agents received limited live support, and any customized coaching came weeks after the conversation. So, Holiday Inn partnered with Cresta to enable greater transparency and real-time support.

Solution

Cresta Agent Assist and Cresta Coach were rolled out in response to a pervasive problem: Holiday Inn managers found coaching their growing teams in a timely manner to be an unmanageable task. They would spend an entire day sifting through call recordings and uncovering coaching opportunities for just one agent. As a result, agents weren’t getting the support they needed, and managers couldn’t effectively target the KPIs most meaningful to the business.

The Holiday Inn sales team (tasked with handling both voice and chat conversations) began using Cresta to improve performance visibility, enable coaching opportunities, and ensure that agents were reminded of best practices in real time.

With Cresta Coach, managers gained a comprehensive view of performance at an individual and team-wide level. Rather than waiting days or weeks for call recordings and then spending additional time picking out coachable moments, managers can now read live call transcripts, effectively monitoring multiple calls at once. Managers report being able to coach multiple agents in a single day, and the impact of their live coaching routine is substantially greater.

As a complement to robust real-time coaching efforts, Cresta Agent Assist actively reminds agents how to best handle a conversation and provides real-time support with features like hints, calls flows, suggested responses, and more. Agent Assist supplies Holiday Inn agents with relevant information during every interaction thanks to knowledge base integration; it also creates an easy escalation process, giving agents a sense of connection with managers—even when working remotely.

Results

Cresta Agent Assist

Cresta had such a positive impact on agent performance that Holiday Inn expanded the solution to four more contact center teams after just nine months. Along with performance, agent satisfaction rose significantly. When Cresta helped facilitate the live support agents needed to succeed, ESAT jumped from 47% to 70% and agent attrition dropped from 120% to 60%.

“Cresta is really the technology of the future. Everybody has Siri or Alexa; they’re used to having systems that help them and that’s what Cresta is.“
– Jason Love, Director of Contact Center Training

Cresta Coach

Real-time coaching and tailored coaching plans allowed managers to more meaningfully support their teams. Managers that could previously review just a handful of recordings now had access to every transcript, resulting in a 7% increase in coached conversations. With targeted coaching on best practices like confidently assuming the sale, agents’ bookings and conversions went through the roof despite lower call volumes during Covid-19. Holiday Inn saw a 42% increase in bookings per day with a 30% increase in conversion rates, all while volume dropped by about 50,000 calls.

“Before Cresta, on-the-spot coaching was way harder… We didn’t have that ability before. So you’d have to wait, then pull last week’s calls, and then you’re coaching on behavior agents did last week. Cresta is instantaneous so I don’t even know if we could quantify how much better it is than how we used to coach. Because in my mind, it’s 100% better because it’s instant coaching.”
– Crissa Warner-Graham, Director of Marketing – Tour & Travel

Creta’s Real-Time Intelligence unlocks new possibilities. While Holiday Inn was initially focused on revenue and conversions, they quickly found that Cresta Coach and Cresta Agent Assist were invaluable for improving agent experience as well.

See Cresta in action

aws Cresta’s real-time solutions are built and hosted on Amazon AWS services, which provide the flexibility, scalability, and security that our customers rely on.