Successful business growth puts a strain on your contact centres. Our video shows how Etihad Airways overcame the issue using a hosted cloud-based solution.
Flying higher than ever.

Etihad Airways has quickly established itself as one of the world’s leading airlines. It has grown from serving 50 destinations to 116 — working with guests in 16 languages across 68 countries. However, such success brings its own challenges. For instance, how does the airline maintain the high quality service it prides itself on as it continues to attract new passengers?

This task faced Project Manager Alex Holcroft when he took on the job of transforming Etihad Airways’ three contact centres in Abu Dhabi, Al Ain and Manchester. The airline views its contact centres as its most important opportunity to create a lasting first impression — wanting every customer interaction to be of the highest quality.

Keeping contact in the cloud.

“The challenge was that those legacy contact centres were run as individual sites”, says Alex. “There was no sense of a single contact centre servicing the entire Etihad Airways business.” That’s why the airline decided to bring them together as one virtual entity on the BT Cloud  Cisco platform.
Using a hosted, cloud-based contact centre allowed Etihad Airways to centralise its resources and exploit economies of scale. The platform integrated all inbound calls into a single queue, helping agents to work more productively.

“We’re able to use our 600 multi-lingual agents around the centres much more effectively”, says Ruth Berkin, Head of Global Contact Centres. “We’ve already started to see a ten per cent increase in their efficiency.

Driving the digital guest experience.

The transformation of Etihad Airways’ contact centres creates an opportunity to better meet the needs of the organisation’s customers. “When the call comes in, precision queuing routes that guest to exactly the right agent”, says Ruth. “They may be in Manchester or they may be in the UAE.”

The change has even allowed the airline to improve its already-high levels of service. With new tools giving agents more control over their day-to-day work, the contact centres have increased the speed of their call responses by almost a third.

And this approach helped guest numbers reach a record of 15 million during 2015. “Etihad Airways is re-imagining the digital guest experience”, says Robert Webb, the airline’s Chief Information and Technology Officer. “In a fantastic partnership with BT and Cisco, we’re leveraging technology innovation — as well as each other’s strengths to improve guest orientation.”