INTERVIEW

THE LISTENING POST

Last year, CWT introduced CWT Listens, a new global approach to improving its service to customers. King Wah Leong, Director, Quality & Customer Experience, Traveller & Transaction Services, tells us more

CONNECT: How does CWT listen and who are you listening to?
KING WAH LEONG: We listen in many ways. It is important that we get feedback from everyone who experiences CWT products and services, and that includes travellers, travel managers, travel arrangers, our employees and industry partners such as airlines and hotels.

We have a whole range of ways to capture feedback from each audience and CWT Listens is just one important avenue of feedback. With Listens, we are very focused on the traveller and travel-arranger audiences, and their perception when they interact with CWT. Our objective is best explained by what we want to achieve: “We want your CWT experience to be the best it can be!”

A common misconception is that Listens is just another online survey. It’s much more than that. Listens is a key element of our Quality and Customer Experience programme. This programme is built on two pillars. The first is “Listening and Responding” – systems built to understand our customers and respond effectively to their needs. The second is “Predicting and Improving” – processes to provide our customers with a consistent and predictable experience.

The key differentiator for Listens is the rigour and the subsequent follow-up that takes place when we get feedback from a traveller complaining about a bad CWT experience. We focus on getting to the root cause of a problem and using the analysis to drive continuous improvement of the underlying processes.

C: Does every traveller get surveyed?
KWL: Eventually yes, but not every single time they make a reservation. Research shows that if you send a survey too often to someone they will eventually ignore it. We send survey invites when a travel booking is completed. A frequent traveller will only receive an invitation to participate in the survey once every 180 days, regardless of whether the survey is completed or not.

C: And how does it work?
KWL: We engaged CustomerSat to manage the survey process. We decided to use a third party to leverage their technology and to assure impartiality of the data. Very soon after the reservation is ticketed, a CWT Listens survey invitation is sent by email. It doesn’t matter if the traveller booked using an online booking tool or if a CWT travel counsellor assisted them. The survey is very short and most participants complete it within 60 seconds – it’s really easy! This results in an exceptionally high response rate: over 30 per cent of travellers respond to a Listens invitation, usually within one to two days.

C: What do you do with the feedback?
KWL: We take all feedback very seriously. We are able to detect situations where travellers are delighted with the service they received and compliment us. When travellers mention our counsellors by name, we ensure that these counsellors are appropriately recognised.

We are able to identify travellers who didn’t have the best CWT experience. When this happens, CWT Listens is intelligent enough to figure out who has given the feedback and which fulfilment centre serviced them. With this information, Listens automatically generates an alert and forwards it to the appropriate CWT Traveller & Transaction Services (TTS) team member and programme manager. We make it a point to contact the traveller very quickly to better understand how we could improve his or her experience. Most customers are surprised when we contact them about their feedback. The most common reaction is “Wow! CWT is actually reading my feedback?” Yes we are, every single one, and we are taking action to fix the cause of the problem too.

Alerts are logged into CWT Resolve – our Issue Resolution tool – to ensure that issues are acted upon and closed in a timely fashion. This closed loop process is vital to continually improving our services. A good example of this in action was recent feedback received from a traveller who had been waiting over three months for a refund. This feedback was routed to the leaders of that country and action was taken immediately. The TTS manager contacted the traveller the next day, clarified the issue and provided a date when the traveller could expect to receive the refund. We received an email from the traveller thanking us.

C: What are the strategic benefits of CWT Listens?
KWL: Strategically, we analyse CWT Listens data to identify systemic opportunities within our countries, with our clients or with our products. The key metric is the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which measures the difference between the Promoters (people who love our service) and Detractors (those who are dissatisfied). We track the numbers very carefully and if we see a client’s NPS score fall, we get together with the appropriate TTS and programme managers to execute an action plan to rectify the situation. A great example of this took place in France. A client had negative NPS scores in January and February this year. The French team analysed the reasons why the travellers were complaining and found they were not happy about the implementation of a new itinerary format. Once the root cause was identified, action was taken and outcomes communicated to the travellers. I am happy to report that this client now has a positive NPS and it is rising every month.

C: Is there any one topic that receives the most feedback?
KWL: Online booking tools. Users often compare their corporate online booking tool’s user interface with travel or airline booking websites (which lack the complexity of a business trip booking tool). CWT Listens enables us to rank the various online booking tools and highlight areas of opportunity. We use this information to drive improvement with the various online booking tool providers and, in close liaison with them, actively review their development road map and how it matches with our feedback and their satisfaction scores.

Another hot topic is that “CWT is expensive” in relation to the airfares offered on the web. We take this feedback very seriously and explain to the traveller that our aim is always to provide them with the lowest logical fare in line with their company’s travel policy and which meets their business requirements. However, there are occasions that our ticket price may not compare favourably with fares quoted on the internet. This could be due to a number of factors; the cheaper fare may have restrictions on time or date of travel, or is non-refundable or non-adjustable – not always good for business travel.

C: Best feedback you’ve ever received?
KWL: A traveller recently wrote: “In my 25 years of business travel, the CWT team consistently provides the very best service that I’ve ever known. Excellent, first class.” It’s always satisfying when a traveller takes time to recognise our employees.

C: Any final comments?
KWL: I would urge all travellers who receive a survey request to respond and to tell us about your CWT experience.

Up Close with King Wah Leong

King Wah Leong joined CWT in 2008. His career began in 1987 at the Malaysian Power Utility, from where he moved to data solutions provider Cipher Data in Singapore as an engineering manager. In 1997, King Wah returned to Malaysia to work with Syquest, a hard disk drive manufacturer, where he managed all new products and quality. Returning to the island state in 2002 to work with the Singapore Land Authority in strategic planning, King Wah came to CWT after four years at Motorola, where he pursued various customer quality and logistics roles.

When asked about his favourite travel experiences, King Wah finds it hard to pick just one: “When you are travelling to a vacation destination, you tend to be more relaxed and there is a sense of anticipation which adds to the excitement. It’s very unusual for any of those trips not to be a great experience! If I had to choose, I’d say my European ski trip comes out top.”

When he’s not working, King Wah likes to bike-ride along Singapore’s East Coast. “Cycling is a great way to relax, enjoy the outdoors and get some exercise at the same time. The only caveat in Singapore is you have to watch for over-enthusiastic drivers – and occasionally you get caught in torrential downpours!”