How The Tour Guy Implemented Conversation Intelligence for Better Travel Experiences

The Tour Guy is an international tour company that both organizes and resells tours world-wide, mostly in Europe and North America. The Tour Guy offers a superior selection of tours, activities and experiences globally to travelers visiting landmark destinations across Paris, London, Barcelona, Florence, Venice, Milan, NYC, San Francisco, and more. 

The Challenge: A Slow, Manual Call Monitoring Process

The Tour Guy’s customer support team, which consists of 30 travel experts and managers across the U.S., Italy, and India, knew that customer feedback would be a critical way to improve how it delivered meaningful tours and experiences to its traveling customers. 

But the Tour Guy’s call monitoring process was slow and time consuming, with their QA lead spending up to five hours per day listening to calls. Manual call listening was key to ensuring that travel experts in training were adhering to scripts, and to guarantee that tenured travel experts were handling support conversations with empathy, leveraging best practices. Moreover, capturing customer feedback was a big priority, but the Tour Guy team relied on CSAT surveys, which had somewhere between 11 to 15% response rate—not enough to draw meaningful conclusions from the data.

"We can't expect 100% of customers to respond to a survey,” shared Luke Lauer, Senior Customer Experience Manager for The Tour Guy.

Receiving thousands of calls a week during high season, The Tour Guy support team also lacked a call transcription service. This made the process of reviewing calls, hearing what was said, and extracting important insights on what customers were asking for to improve its offerings very challenging. With a continuously growing team of travel experts, The Tour Guy needed a way to both improve CX and maintain quality standards to meet the demands of their customers, especially as their support team continued to expand across various locations.

That’s when Lauer was tasked with figuring out how to reduce the amount of time spent manually listening to calls.

"[Our QA lead] was manually listening to phone calls from our travel experts with customers for quality control and quality assurance. She was probably touching less than 1% of calls. We knew something needed to change.”

Finding a Solution: Why The Tour Guy Chose Echo AI 

When the Tour Guy learned about Echo AI in their search for a tool that would help them analyze the Voice of the Customer (VoC) to improve customer service, the platform immediately resonated. 

“When Echo AI explained that their platform provided a way to deeply understand our customer needs while evaluating quality performance, it sounded exactly like the kind of solution we were looking for," Lauer shared.

Following their internal policy, The Tour Guy compared at least three different solutions to ensure they were selecting the best option, ranging from older players in the conversation analytics space to newer QA tools.

Ultimately, The Tour Guy chose to partner with Echo AI based on several critical factors: 

Depth of Insights

The Tour Guy team was impressed by the depth of insights they got from customer conversations when using the platform. Since Echo AI is built on Generative Conversation Intelligence (GenCI), autonomously generated insights surface valuable, previously unknown learnings from interactions.

GenCI uses multiple large language models, or LLMs, to analyze millions of customer data points at once and extract robust, AI-generated insights on critical business risks and opportunities. Generative CI surfaces topics, themes and keywords at a level of detail that is unmatched by most other technologies on the market. 

The Tour Guy now uses generative insights to extract valuable information that can be used to improve their offerings and overall customer experience.

Smooth Proof of Concept

The Proof of Concept (POC) process enabled The Tour Guy to use their own data on the Echo AI platform, ingesting a percentage of calls to get insight on common customer complaints, reasons behind cancellations, and more.

During the POC, The Tour Guy got access to:

• Call transcripts from analyzed conversations, with the ability to jump to key points of interest from the call. 

• A snapshot of the top themes and trends surfaced from all conversations, broken down into sub-themes and automatically generated with AI.

• A test drive in AutoQA, which automatically scored every conversation with high accuracy to reduce the burden of QA evaluations on the team.

The outcomes from the POC process played a key role in helping Lauer get buy-in among internal stakeholders, who could see firsthand what kinds of learnings would result from the implementation of Echo AI.

Speed of Time-to-Value

The speed to value was unmatched by other vendors, allowing The Tour Guy to see immediate benefits. Within just a few hours of the POC, they were up and running with insights from their own data. The full implementation process took three weeks, with minimal effort from the team.

Implementation: How The Tour Guy Went Live in Three Weeks

As The Tour Guy put it, from day one, the results were evident for their team.

 "We could monitor team performance for 100% of interactions without spending hours listening to calls," Lauer shared. "We launched mid-May, and the results were visible immediately." 

Weekly check-ins ensured that questions were answered and milestones were being hit according to plan. "The process was smooth and quick. I want to acknowledge Grace and Roop for their work," he noted. "I was impressed with how quickly we went from signing up to launching."

The implementation process of Echo AI required minimal effort from The Tour Guy team, thanks to the platform's generative AI infrastructure. This foundation on Large Language Models (LLMs) allowed for quick ingestion of data with little configuration needed. Echo AI took on the heavy lifting, ensuring that insights were populating within hours, and that all integrations, data pipeline setup, and training occurred within three weeks.

Week 1 - Integrations & Environment Setup

In the first week, the focus was on data source integration with platforms like Gorgias and environment setup. This included a kickoff meeting to align goals and expectations, followed by the completion of an onboarding sheet to gather necessary information. Data integration and account setup were also completed during this time, establishing a strong foundation for Echo AI to work effectively.

Week 2 - Data Pipeline Setup

The second week involved setting up the AI analysis pipeline and gathering initial feedback. The Echo AI team set up the data pipelines and conducted a quality phase by analyzing 50 conversations. They also set up the cancellations stream to capture specific insights related to customer cancellations. This phase was crucial for refining the AI's capabilities and ensuring it met the specific needs of The Tour Guy.

Week 3 - Insights Configuration

By the third week, The Tour Guy had access to self-generating insights. The team reviewed and addressed any feedback from the previous weeks, ran a second batch of conversations for further analysis, and continued to fine-tune and iterate on new insights. By the end of the implementation, they had access to custom generative insights, or ‘Streams’, ready for use, tailored to their specific needs. 

The implementation also included the fine-tuning of prompt configurations to align with The Tour Guy’s key use cases. They also had their AutoQA scorecard with customized questions based on their unique processes ready to go. This comprehensive and efficient setup process ensured that The Tour Guy could start benefiting from Echo AI's advanced capabilities almost immediately.

The Solution: How The Tour Guy Is Boosting Efficiency and Improving Operations

The Tour Guy is already seeing significant value from Echo AI with enhanced visibility into customer questions and concerns, better insight into its travel experts’ performance, and even a strategic view into other areas of the business such as marketing and business development.

Identifying Issues Faster

The Tour Guy now has improved visibility to identify frequently asked questions and recurring issues much sooner than before, enabling timely interventions.

“We can identify issues sooner. For example, if there was an issue with an experience last summer, we didn't really find out about it until the reviews started rolling in months later. Now, we can really get ahead of it.”

Evaluating Team Performance Instantly

With AutoQA, The Tour Guy uses AI to evaluate every agent interaction at scale with less manual effort.

“We can look at the performance of our team for 100% of interactions without spending hours a day listening to phone calls,” Lauer noted. This immediate benefit has streamlined their quality assurance process.

Boosting Marketing Campaigns

Additionally, Echo AI enhances The Tour Guy’s marketing and customer engagement efforts by identifying their most positive and happy customers. They can engage more effectively with satisfied customers, create specific ‘Streams’ for customers who expressed great feedback, and use this for testimonials and engagement opportunities. Lauer explained, “engaging with our most positive and happy customers for marketing features is a huge opportunity for us.”

Creating New Travel Packages & Offerings

Echo AI also provides strategic insights into where to expand and create new offerings. When travel experts ask customers about the types of experiences they’d like to see more of, Echo AI can capture this feedback to create new packages, add destinations, and prioritize them based on frequency of occurrence. 

“We can answer questions about customer comments from other departments much more easily,” Lauer mentioned. 

Plus, the Tour Guy’s e-commerce specialist can pull recurring questions from generative insights and add answers to these questions directly to their services and packages pages, enhancing their FAQ section and overall customer support. 

“Now, our e-commerce specialist doesn’t have to play guessing games to improve our website pages; she has a single source of truth she can reference that is always updating and becoming more accurate with time.”

In Conclusion

The Tour Guy's partnership with Echo AI has delivered immediate and tangible benefits. By using Echo AI, the travel company has significantly improved its quality assurance process, gaining the ability to monitor all customer interactions without spending hours manually listening to calls. 

Echo AI has enabled The Tour Guy to identify and address customer issues much faster, fine-tuning and improving tour offerings based on direct feedback without CSAT surveys. Additionally, the insights from Echo AI allow The Tour Guy to continually refine their tours and customer service, ultimately enhancing the travel experiences they offer worldwide.

“With Echo AI, we can gather feedback ourselves, getting deeper insights into customer interactions and addressing recurring issues more swiftly. The potential to enhance our tour offerings globally is immense, and I am eager to see what the future holds with this new way of acting on customer insights to keep new and existing travelers coming back for more.”