Freshworks sparks customer service revival at Thomas Cook

Since its relaunch in 2020 as an online-only travel business, Thomas Cook—the storied U.K.-based travel company founded in 1841—has aspired to combine the personalized experience of working with a travel agent with the ease of digital platforms and tools.

Delivering on that promise for a massive customer base is no easy feat. With a high volume of support tickets, the company’s 80 agents were often overwhelmed with the needs of over 20,000 customers per week and required an automated system to keep pace. 

Freshworks integrated with Thomas Cook’s existing tech stack, clearing a path to help agents resolve tickets more efficiently. In the past, tickets submitted via email passed through too many internal touchpoints, slowing down routing. With Freshdesk, a new suite of web-based ticket forms for customers reduced those checkpoints and allowed immediate routing to the right agents. 

Faster, better routing helped boost overall support capacity while reducing the number of unresolved queries. Freshworks’ AI-powered chatbots (Freddy Self Service), meanwhile, helped reduce customer reliance on phone and live chat, which further raised customer satisfaction scores.

“Freshworks really understood our business,” says Hayley Chambers, head of customer operations at Thomas Cook. “They helped to tailor what we do to support our customer support strategy.” 

The company

Global travel company Thomas Cook creates custom travel packages including flights, hotels, and car rentals based on budgets and customer preferences, all via an easy-to-use digital platform. 

The challenge

As travelers began booking more trips after the pandemic, the company struggled to keep up with a surge in support requests. One key support channel, live chat, was plagued with downtime and didn’t support key features, such as WhatsApp Business. Other channels weren’t integrated, which meant agents lacked visibility into the status of conversations in different channels. An agent speaking to a customer about rescheduling a canceled flight would have no information about where the customer was flying.

Without automated ticket routing, agents couldn’t keep up with service tickets. Meanwhile, customers who tried to answer their own questions dealt with outdated FAQ pages and broken chatbots; others complained about long wait times while agents were reaching a breaking point.

The solution

Thomas Cook sought a customer service solution that would:

• Allow agents to handle higher daily ticket volume 

• Boost customer satisfaction scores

• Reduce the need for live conversations to free up agents for complex issues 

• Integrate with existing technology tools

In switching to Freshworks, Thomas Cook gained access to a flexible, highly automated, omnichannel support solution. Thanks to AI-powered chatbots and streamlined ticketing, Thomas Cook offered faster and more effective customer support, not only opening up new channels to customers but managing those conversations across channels.

Impact

With simplified ticketing, automated routing, and streamlined workflows, Thomas Cook agents resolved support requests faster and more efficiently. This reduced how long it took to handle each ticket, decreasing the number of unresolved tickets by 37% and increasing daily ticket capacity by 55%. 

Customers began to trust and rely on email and chat channels to deliver fast resolutions, lightening agents’ load on live channels like the phone. Customers noted the difference: Within months of implementing the solution, Thomas Cook doubled its customer satisfaction rating from two to four stars on Trustpilot, a popular review website.

None of this would have been possible, says Chambers, without Freshworks’ constant focus on customer needs. “Working with Freshworks,” she says, “it feels like they listen to us.”