High tech can lead to higher human touchpoints

GlobalTix’s Chan Chee Chong and Nam Ho’s Marshall share how technology can help agents further drive better engagement and customer service.

Filmmakers have loved to unsettle us with movies that depict machines taking over the world. But don’t hear it from the movie industry, hear it from two innovators in the tourism industry who live and breathe everything travel. At CruiseWorld Asia 2022, Chan Chee Chong, CEO of GlobalTix and Marshall Ooi, director of Nam Ho Group, enthused about the ways new technologies have significantly enhanced the way they do business, grown their operations and increased headcount.

“Tech helps us sell better and helps us work better, and the best tech is invisible,” said long-term tech advocator Yeoh Siew Hoon, moderator founder of Web in Travel.  Yeoh was backed up by Chan and Ooi, who described how the benefits of tech have greatly contributed to their businesses in the post-pandemic landscape.

 

Nam Ho’s company grew as a result of API integration which allowed them to hire new staff to tap into previously untapped segments.

 

Over the previous two years, Nam Ho Group heavily invested in enhancing its Application Programming Interface (API). Chan explained that API can be likened to “computers talking to each other. For example, the system will ask ‘does your customer want to go on a cruise, yes or no,’ if it’s yes, next it will ask is ‘give me the date and the number of guests’.”

“API drives incremental business revenue as it makes the processes faster and more efficient,” Ooi said. “Once you adopt API, you’ll be able to read something most agents can’t — data — which shows you how good is your sales today, what is selling well, and basically capture more information.

“Through this, we can also understand how often our customers come to us, how much they spend on average, so that we can also provide better customer service.”

Chan added, “At the end of the day, technology doesn’t just stop at API. It is really to empower your staff to be able to do much more than what they can do, and that is to know your customer and what they want.”

Potentially, Adopting API could be one of the solutions to a similar train of thought shared by Michael Goh, president of Resorts World Cruises, in an earlier panel discussion at CruiseWorld Asia 2022 where he said that travel players should have “good data” to effectively reach their target market.

In working with new technologies and onboarding API, Nam Ho hired a team of staff to lead the charge and “influence the older, senior staff and convince them that the data derived from it can help them close more sales or understand their customers better”.

“We have more staff now. It’s because of the new staff and the API that we can service a different segment of customers that were previously untapped, and grow our company,” Ooi added.

* This article was originally published here