By Sandeep Dwivedi
Travel businesses in India have been mostly established in the front-office, middle-office, back-office model, each department with its own set of work. Traditionally, the model split included client-facing, work from supporting functions and transactional data-heavy tasks.
While the original separations were logical and sensible when they were first established, they also took advantage of the only currency of work output: Employees. Given the evolution of process transformation and agile process technologies, processes that have not adapted have become discontinuous with handovers becoming clunky, illogical and definitely not customer centric. The model, whilst making sense twenty years ago, is outdated and limiting today.
In the age of automation, the concept of better customer facing responsibilities has grown, supported by strong technology in the backend. It allows us to remove tedious and repetitive work from employees, help leverage those same employees to focus on problem solving, customer-facing and high-value skills to manage difficult or unusual issues and support the customer directly. This is of much greater benefit to the business, its customers and just as importantly the employee base.
As a result of this gradual evolution, travel technology companies have designed softwares that automate and deliver intelligent solutions in each step of their businesses. There are smart booking tools from Global Distribution Systems which has helped the customer facing executive to altogether skip the tedious learning process of cryptic commands and directly start booking travel for their customers through point and click features. There are advanced software solutions which offer customizations, big data’s that deliver intelligent choices and finally smart tools that helps review the chosen product.
Today’s travel agents have smart solutions in response to almost all of their travel business related hurdles with latest technology offerings. From efficient booking processes to Void, reissue, refund and revalidations, extraction of business intelligence reports, tracking missed revenues and error free accounting processes and much more, they can deliver better in shorter time.
Even for online players, smart online templates are readily available for making changes and starting their businesses. It’s just time and motivations for individuals that matters today. With the help of technology any student can become an entrepreneur, and our ever flourishing travel industry has numerous successful examples of the same pedagogy. The technology has enabled each one of us, especially in the travel industry to remove the barriers of manual processes and achieve our goals seamlessly through advanced travel solutions.
