Who Is Lou?

Lou Zonato is the CX Director at Loveholidays.

About Loveholidays

Loveholidays is the largest online travel agent in the UK, booking and managing the vacations of millions of customers in the UK, Ireland and Germany.

Lou’s CX Journey

Lou has worked in customer service for 30 years across a wide range of industries. He has worked as an outsourced provider as well as in-house at telecom, travel, and food delivery companies. He has a track record of joining companies as they scale, working with anywhere from 20 to 10,000 full-time employees, which prepared him for his role at the rapidly growing loveholidays. 

He joined the team during the pandemic, mentioning “Joining a travel company in a pandemic was an interesting decision to make,” he says. But with his comprehensive experience, he was positioned to effectively lead an international team of 550, delivering quality CX to travelers worldwide. 

The CX Team at Loveholidays

Lou’s team is spread across Germany, the UK, India, and South Africa. 85% of their customer service is outsourced. 

Structurally, his team includes a Head of Customer Service who is responsible for the operational components of guiding a customer before, during, and upon return from vacation. 

A Head of Customer Operations is responsible for changes customers want to make to their booking. “Believe me, people want to make changes to their bookings before they go, it’s crazy how many customers want or need to make changes to their booking before they go. Travel is different in this way because the purchase journey can last months - from point of purchase to point of fulment i.e. when the holiday is taken” he says.

His team also includes a Training and Engagement Lead, who is a global representative covering all the contact centers. There’s also a Head of Germany Customer Service. 

As for the Head of Forecasting and Planning, “He’s my eyes and ears, making sure we’ve got the right people in the right place at the right time to deliver the metrics we put in and hold ourselves up to,” he says.

Noticeably, his team has the bases covered across the entire, potentially year-long customer journey, not just the initial purchase experience.

Leading a CX Team

Such coordination requires clear leadership. Lou finds success in building face-to-face relationships, including with their international team, visiting Germany, India, and South Africa regularly. “That kind of face-to-face engagement is so important from the mental side of their jobs because when they're speaking to customers every single day, all they're doing is sorting out problems,” he says.

Lou also teaches others to lead. “We’re bringing people up,” he says. “We’re giving younger people an opportunity to be mentored and coached in managerial positions. On a personal level, it gives me a lot of pleasure to be able to coach because that’s what happened to me.”

“Look after your people. If you look after your people, your people will look after your customers”

KPIs Lou is Tracking

Lou’s personal favorite is customer satisfaction. “CSAT tells me not only what our customers think of our people, but also what they think of our policies and processes” he says. 

CX for travel companies is uniquely comprehensive, from helping plan a trip and executing a smooth vacation to maintaining customer relationships upon their return. It has to be comprehensive because a vacation is a journey— and a memorable one at that. 

“If I ask anybody to tell me their last five or six vacations, they’d be able to remember where they went, how they felt, whether the weather was good, what the flight was like, what the hotel was like,” he says. “If I asked you what your lunch was like two weeks ago, you wouldn’t be able to tell me.” This $2,000 purchase requires a whole other level of customer support compared to a $15 lunch. 

That’s why after the vacation, they use NPS to gauge the entire customer journey, from purchase to service. “We ask NPS when customers get back from holidays and then we can talk to them about their entire customer journey,” he says. “I don't think customers make recommendation decisions or repeat purchase decisions based on one transaction.”

Tech Stack

Kustomer

UJet

Slack

Assembled/Jigsaw: “We’re trialing Jigsaw versus Assembled for focusing planning.” 

AI or Not to AI?

Loveholidays utilizes a lot of automation, with AI handling 60% of chat and 15% of voice with evidence that customers’ issues are being resolved. “Customers aren’t returning within a week—we know that they're being resolved,” he says. So Lou is all for AI—“as long as it enhances the customer experience.”

Enhancing CX is exactly what they have been able to do with their chatbot friend Sandy. “Sandy is pretty awesome,” he says. “And we’ve got people sitting behind Sanday, listening and adjusting all the time.”

That way if there’s a volcano, for instance, the team will feed Sandy new responses, all the time. “Some days we get higher CSAT on the bot than we do on the people!” While humans are typically dealing with the hardest stuff, with the easier tickets given to Sandy, it’s still an impressive metric for their bot.

Sandy also stands out as a “home-built” bot, leveraging Google’s technology to teach effective conversation skills. “It’s not just conversations that are transactional, it’s conversations that are contextual as well,” he says.

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