Australia’s leading experiential tourism group Journey Beyond’s commitment to its customers is to consistently deliver unmatched services, unparalleled experiences and lifetime memories – from the moment they first engage with Journey Beyond to plan their experience, to when they return home at the end of their travels. RingCentral is helping Journey Beyond achieve these customer experience goals with the deployment of RingCentral MVP and Contact Centre, RingCentral’s integrated UCaaS and CCaaS platforms.
Part of the Hornblower Group, Journey Beyond comprises 13 tourism brands: iconic trains The Ghan, Indian Pacific, Great Southern and The Overland; premium small-group outback operator Outback Spirit; eco-luxe lodge Sal Salis Ningaloo Reef; aquatic adventures Cruise Whitsundays, Rottnest Express, Horizontal Falls Seaplane Adventures, Darwin Harbour Cruises and Journey Beyond Cruise Sydney; and its tallest members, Melbourne Skydeck and Eureka89.
The high-end nature of the travel experience, particularly for a Journey Beyond rail adventure or an Outback Spirit tour, needs to be evident from the first point of contact with the customer all the way through the guest experience and beyond. Journey Beyond takes this one step further by emulating the customer experience across all its products. Nigel Brohier, General Manager, Travel Central and Holidays, Journey Beyond says, “Our overall strategy is to have a customer experience that’s second-to-none, regardless of what Journey Beyond adventure you are booking. All of our guests are equally important to us.”
With the diversification of its business through acquisition, Journey Beyond inherited a number of different technology systems, including six different phone systems and an outdated contact centre that was only servicing Journey Beyond’s rail journeys.
Journey Beyond’s first step in this regard was to establish a common unified communications (UC) platform across the business and integrate it with a new contact centre (CC) solution.
“Now we have a single RingCentral UC platform across the business, which has been fantastic for us to support centrally. It’s simple, but it’s a complex enough solution to contain all of the functionality we need. Understanding and configuring the different functionalities and features is the most challenging part, but it works like a charm,” says Madhumita Mazumdar, General Manager Information & Communications Technology, Journey Beyond.
In addition to deploying RingCentral MVP to all businesses nationally, to date Journey Beyond’s rail division and Rottnest Express have rolled out RingCentral Contact Centre, with onboarding for another two businesses in progress. A key advantage of the tight integration between UC and CC is the customer service operation’s accessibility for the entire Journey Beyond team.
“At a national integrated level, we can have subject matter experts in each of our experiences available to deliver unrivalled customer experience, with economies of scale so if one team is under duress in terms of call volumes, the call can be overflowed and picked up quickly by a consultant with secondary expertise in that brand,” says Brohier.
Journey Beyond is supporting its customer experience drive by integrating RingCentral Contact Centre with Salesforce to develop omni-channel CX capabilities and build towards a 360-degree view of the customer.
“We are building up our ‘Know You Customer’ strategy, which starts with our customer service agents knowing who you are when you call any of our Journey Beyond brands,” says Mazumdar.
With the business still midway through its transformational journey, Mazumdar emphasises the importance of the relationship with RingCentral in the ongoing success of its program. “Journey Beyond and RingCentral are partners. Together, we discuss and decide what we are going to implement, and what’s going to work well for our business, and ultimately, our customers.”
“Journey Beyond is all about creating awesome traveller experiences, so it’s good to be able to correlate that to their contact centre and how technology is enabling that customer experience,” concluded Peter Hughes, Area Vice President at RingCentral.
Originally published 25 Feb, 2023
