Transcom

Reviewing your outsourcing setup, or about to sign a new contract? Twelve things to check first, from how TUI and Transcom run customer service as one team.

TUI had customers stranded in the Middle East and Southeast Asia at the same time. Transcom moved people between projects, and price was discussed afterwards. Here’s how that partnership works.

Hybrid customer care, where humans are the premium. That's the third shift I'm seeing in travel, and most service models still have it the wrong way round. Customers want to change, cancel and rebook themselves, and they're further along than our policies assume. The simple contacts are leaving the contact centre. They should. What's left is the escalation, the cancellation that matters, the family stuck somewhere. When a customer reaches a person now, it's because it's serious. That person isn't the fallback any more. They're the top tier of your service. Two things follow. The first is about the advisor: less script, more judgment. Nobody is a premium tier reading from a card. The second is about who the advisor is. If the human moment decides how the customer feels about you, it matters whether that human sits inside your organisation or at the end of a queue. In our work with TUI, for example, the advisors who take those calls sit inside TUI's own teams, on the same systems, with the same right to decide – whether their badge says TUI or Transcom. The customer never feels the seam. I moderated a LinkedIn Live on exactly this with Ramón Delima from TUI and Dario Bakovic from Transcom. We wrote down how the two companies run customer service as one team, and twelve things to check in your own setup before you outsource, or renew. Download it here: https://lnkd.in/dfmcgRmS

Planning an AI pilot in customer service? TUI and Transcom ran them for five years, the failures included. What happened, what it cost, and what to copy on Monday

Some vendors are wrapping up RPA and calling it agentic AI. I said it live, with Ramón Delima from TUI and Dario Bakovic from Transcom next to me. I'll say it again here, because it's the trend I see most and the one that costs buyers the most. The difference is simple. Agentic AI can do the thing: the payment, the booking, the cancellation, the change. RPA runs the script it was given. One of them is being sold under the other's name. I'm not naming names. A quick way to tell: ask what happens when the customer's situation isn't in the flow. A script escalates. An agent works out the next step, and knows when to hand over to a person. I've spent 22 years on the customer side of travel. The expensive mistake right now isn't picking the wrong AI. It's picking on the vendor's vocabulary. I moderated a LinkedIn Live on exactly this with Ramón Delima from TUI and Dario Bakovic from Transcom. They have run five years of AI pilots together. We wrote the lessons down: what happened, what it cost, and what to copy on Monday, plus the two pages they now fill in before any pilot starts. Download it here: https://lnkd.in/dDnCsctk

Treat AI like a newly hired person. Held by the hand, shadowed and checked before it does anything for you. I said that on our LinkedIn Live with TUI. It isn't a metaphor. It's the process. A new advisor gets a buddy, a knowledge base and weeks of someone listening in. Nobody puts them in front of a stranded family on day one. Then a vendor shows you an agent that handles bookings end to end, and the plan is customers in six weeks. TUI and we have five years of pilots behind us, including the ones that failed. First-generation bots went straight to customers and added frustration, nothing else. One pilot scaled into multiple markets at high volume before either side admitted we weren't ready. So now the AI is the new hire. Our own frontline tests it first, and agents are brutally honest about whether it works. It gets the knowledge base before it gets customers, because a new advisor who can't find the answer can't help anyone, and neither can the AI. And it runs through a season, not a six-week sprint, because in travel six weeks tells you very little. The pilot running now, agentic AI for TUI's retail partners in Germany, went live on 200 organised FAQs after a long stretch of organising data step by step. Around 10% of contacts are deflected, and when the AI can't finish the job, the retailer is handed to a person with the full context. Don't expect magic. Be honest with yourselves. Together with Ramón Delima and Evelyn Hamilton, I wrote down five lessons from those five years, the failures included, and the two pages we now fill in before any pilot starts. Download it here: https://lnkd.in/eFn3rt4g