Selling approximately 3 million holidays per year, the JMC division of Thomas Cook Tour Operations is the UK’s largest holiday provider. With an average industry profit margin of 2.5%, companies in the travel industry are forced to maximize efficiency whilst at the same time maintaining high levels of customer service.

General industry findings suggest that the cost of attracting a new customer is 5 times higher than retaining an existing one, up to 50% of dissatisfied customers who do not complain will defect, faster customer service response times lead to lower monetary rewards to satisfy customers and that 46% of an organizations’ knowledge is in its documents, more than half of which are paper-based. Armed with this information JMC knew it needed to improve on both the way it handled documents and the efficiency of its processes in the Customer Service Department.

The Problem

JMC’s Customer Service Department was staffed by 75 employees. Processing customer complaints was a manually intensive, paper-centric process with many bottlenecks.

On average it took someone 1hr 20min to process a complaint, however the elapsed time to answer a complaint was between two to three weeks. The Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA) stipulates that customer complaints must be acknowledged within 28 days of receipt. Failure to comply results in a £300 fine per incident. Apart from the litigation costs, these fines have an enormous impact on the image of the company concerned.

JMC received approximately 600 complaints per day by mail. After receipt, a Customer Service Report (CSR) was faxed to overseas or departmental representatives related to the complaint. JMC employed four people full-time to fax out these reports.

The overseas representative was given four days to respond with an incident report, after which the individual was reminded and given another four days to reply. The incident reports were used by Customer Services to judge the validity of the complaint and determine whether compensation should be paid.

Approximately 10% of these Customer Service Reports were never received, resulting in the complaint being accepted by default for lack of evidence to challenge the claim. The average compensation per complaint was £70 and total compensation paid increased 96% from the previous year. At 600 complaints a day, this was totalling approximately £84,000 per month!

Documents (or parts thereof) were often misplaced as many different people needed to access the customer’s letter and any reports. After being resolved complaint files were physically stored in different branch locations, as well as off-site with a third party organisation.

With 50,000 complaints expected from the next summer season, a backlog of 9,000 outstanding issues, and a processing capacity of approximately 185 letters per day, JMC was forced to consider re-engineering operations within the department. The backlog alone represented an unnecessary expenditure of £2.7 million on ABTA fines. On top of this were high processing costs, compensation costs, the cost of lost business and the cost of high staff turnover.

The Solution

Following detailed investigation the Company decided to take the following steps:

• Change the work method to a Caseworker model where a complaint is processed by a single multi-skilled person from start to finish, as opposed to specialized roles processing different parts of the claim.
• Reengineer the logistics of processing complaints to improve the management, storage, communication, and control of all relevant information to support the new caseworker model.

Global360's Keyfile Document Management and Keyflow Workflow application were chosen as the vehicle with which to implement the above and Coordinatis was selected to design and develop the complete solution.

The solution was designed to:

• Allow the secure storage of documents in a central location for access by several departments at different locations - avoiding duplication, physical handing and loss.
• Permit identification and viewing of documents from different sites.
• Provide an easy-to-use graphical interface for fast retrieval of all documents pertaining to a case.
• Free up office space by removing filing cabinets. Reduce the cost of physically storing, transferring and managing paper.
• Ensure compliance with the processing of data in accordance with the principles of the 1998 Data Protection Act.
• Enable recovery in the event of physical records being lost.

The objectives of the resulting implementation were to:

• Handle complaints received by paper, email or fax.
• Automatically process the resulting documents and generate workflows for each new complaint received.
• Send workflow tasks to the correct team of caseworkers based on various business rules. 
• Quickly find, process and check the status of a complaint.
• Remove the possibility of being fined by ABTA for delayed complaints.
• Capture pertinent case data on eForms rather than on paper, omitting the re-keying and duplication of data as well as avoiding human error.
• Automatically generate emails to overseas Reps with all relevant case documents attached, capture their replies and automatically remind them when they haven’t responded in time.
• Provide Caseworkers with all the information and documents they need to hand in order to rapidly process a case.

Benefits Achieved

The benefits achieved by the solution speak for themselves:

• Letter handling capacity has been increased by 26,000 with no additional staff.
• Complaint turnaround has been reduced by between 25 – 50%.
• Staff in Customer Services have become 30% more productive, together with much greater job satisfaction and reduced staff turnover.
• JMC has reduced its average response time for complaints to 7 days - well within ABTA requirements.
• Compensation paid, litigation costs, postage, fax bills and overtime costs have all been considerably reduced.

As a result JMC has made considerable cost savings since implementation whilst delivering much improved levels of service to its customers.