About the Company
Growing awareness of attraction centers around the world, faster and more reliable transport systems, and internet booking are some of the reasons for the booming Travel and Leisure Industry. Over the years, tour operators and travel companies have improved touring experiences for leisure tourists by breaking barriers of language, currency, and costs of tours. But creating these leisure travel and tour packages is no easy feat, operators are constantly researching, identifying, and buying individual travel components to deliver the best travel components, and technology integration has been a large part of their success.
Our new client is a travel and tour company providing group travel packages across diverse destinations around the world. The company’s technology team reached out to the OneDesk support team to know if OneDesk has the tools to support their ticketing needs and project management tools for their project management. The team couldn’t have been more convinced.
OneDesk as a software platform combines both helpdesk and project management functionalities which are required by the travel and tour company. The company can now manage their client tourists while also handling internal logistics on the same system.
Travel Agency Helpdesk
Modularity and mobility are essential attributes of effective management and helpdesk system for a tour operator. Thus, OneDesk achieves this through the three modular applications comprising the OneDesk platform. First is the OneDesk mobile app which delivers the needed mobility. This ensures the tech team and other staff of the travel company can respond to client tickets and perform other internal operations typical of OneDesk, while on the move. The OneDesk Mobile app is available on Android and iOS platforms.
Customer Apps & Ticketing
The second OneDesk app, the customer app, provides the facilities for ticketing and helpdesk on the client-side. Thus, tourists interact with this app to connect with the travel agency. The app is installed on the company’s website as a widget for clients to access, and clients can also be invited to the web version of the app through invite links. The customer app has four tabs – messenger, portal, webform, and knowledgebase. A messenger tab is a live chat tool that can be used by customers to communicate with the travel company’s support teams. The webform and portal tabs will enable customers to create and manage tickets respectively, and the agency can display helpful articles for clients via the webform tab.
The Travel Company’s internal team will address customer tickets and manage projects within the Main app interface. The OneDesk main app allows the team to establish live chat sessions with customers, and they can also create tickets from these live chat conversations. OneDesk provides several other channels through which tickets can be created such as sending them by mail, importing them in specified spreadsheet formats, or even by creating them manually on the main app.
When it comes to ticketing, automation is a huge part of OneDesk. The travel company’s team can now configure and send automated bot messages in response to certain events such as a response to notify a customer that a ticket has been created for them. They can also add avatar and sender name to these bot messages to personalize the experience for their customers. Tickets can also be auto-assigned or assigned manually to specific team members or an entire team on creation.
The OneDesk ticketing system is built to support conversations on each ticket created. The team can start conversations with a client regarding the corresponding ticket. In addition to that, OneDesk also allows the team to create private conversation threads on the same ticket which will be dedicated to communication with other internal members of the team. This is particularly suited for operational information about the ticket which the customer is not expected to see.
The ticketing app also has a lifecycle status feature that notifies authorized parties of the current status of the ticket such as pending, created, and resolved. Lifecycle statues are very flexible and can be configured as desired. Status of each ticket can also be made visible to the customer within the customer app if the travel company desires to keep the customers informed about the progress of their tickets.
Projects
Project lifecycle statuses are either updated manually by the internal team or automatically by OneDesk workflow automation. Automation takes effect in response to predefined events such as logging a timesheet to indicate the number of hours worked on the ticket. These timesheets can be logged in one of three ways including starting a timer on the ticket panel, manually logging a timesheet, or by importing timesheets in given formats.
Some tickets submitted to the travel operator require further processing and access project management tools that are more sophisticated than the ticketing system can provide. OneDesk task tool is well-suited for this purpose. OneDesk task has the features of the ticketing system, with the addition of advanced project management tools for planning and scheduling. Existing tickets on the platform can be easily converted to tasks, while the team can also create tasks manually from the main app interface. OneDesk also allows the team to create and export report about ongoing tasks, tickets, and other activities on the system, using a customizable report template. The reporting process can be automated, sending an automated report of tasks and tickets to designated email addresses at intervals such as weekly or monthly.
Views
With several ongoing activities to manage, OneDesk provides a series of views to give the team a clear perspective. The OneDesk main app houses a set of views, each presenting a unique perspective of ongoing activities. The tree view presents a list of tasks and tickets in a hierarchy, displaying which tickets or tasks belong to which project. The flat view uniquely presents a plain view of all tasks or tickets in no relation to the container project. This can be particularly useful when performing a quick sort through tickets.
The calendar view is a representation of activities monthly. The Gantt takes a different approach by displaying the schedule of activities in comparison to the actual time spent performing those activities. This makes the Gantt view an especially useful project management tool. The dashboard view is another view which presents the activities using various comprehensive charts.
Customizable user experience is vital to the operation of a travel company, and OneDesk is a flexible system that prioritizes customization. OneDesk enables the company to configure both the app interfaces and that of the outgoing email templates. The company has control over the look and feel of automated and user-generated emails to be sent to customers. The company also can modify other components such as time zone and working hours among other things. OneDesk allows the company to enable or disable any component or application without affecting the overall system performance.
Considering the dynamics of running a travel company, OneDesk supports integration with other third-party applications. The system also has several hundreds of readily available integrations with mainstream systems such as Dropbox, which is achieved via a third-party system, Zapier. The travel company can now extend and integrate its helpdesk and project management system with other enterprise systems across the world, either by using existing integrations or by creating their custom Zapier integration.