Welcome to the July edition of Tektalk, and it’s been a busy month for us. You may have seen the news in the trade press that we secured our funding, and in the process, we have also appointed a new chairman. Phil joins us with a wealth of experience and will be involved as we embark on our product rebuild and further plans for growth.
Sadly we said goodbye to Karen McCarthy this week after four years at Traveltek. Karen was an extremely popular and energetic member of our team who was a real customer advocate, and I know many of our customers loved working with her. Karen decided she needed a change from the travel world and has entered the fintech world, so we wish her all the best, and the team gave her a great send-off in London last week over a few drinks. I’m delighted to announce that Hayley West has stepped into the Head of Account Management position after being with Traveltek for nearly four years. Hayley has done an amazing job of being a real customer champion in her tenure with Traveltek, always going the extra mile for her customers and being the internal voice of the customer. She has also been a real driving force behind our improvements in customer service and our positive gains in our NPS improvement. Hayley will now be recruiting an additional member to her team, and we will communicate this to you when we have news. Neil Welsh has stepped in to assist some of our UK customers as their key point of contact during this transition period. In addition to Hayley’s promotion, we have also promoted Tracy Sharp from Commercial Manager to Head of EMEA. Tracy will now take responsibility for Account Management and sales in EMEA and global supplier relationships. Again, we are currently recruiting to backfill this role within Tracy’s new structure. In other team news, we have successfully onboarded many of our recruits in the V2 tech team and the supplier and maintenance teams, and we are delighted with our recent progress.
On June 17th, we held our first team get together in the new Glasgow office, where I saw many old faces (not all in age!) and several new ones for the first time in person. We completed a day of intense planning with our product and tech teams to agree on our first project milestone, and we look forward to our next set of product webinars held on 8th and 9th September at various time zones for certain teams. We are also planning client visits for product feedback and will contact a range of partners who have asked to actively input into this part of the process. If you are keen to get your team involved, please contact leanne@traveltek.net.
Next week we will be launching our first basic data insights product to the UK market. This has been a long time in the planning, but we are delighted to finally bring this product to the market after a lengthy data warehouse set-up and sync process. We can currently see that bookings are -13% in June v 2019; that the ABV’s is 25% higher than 2019. There is also some, as expected, longer lead times on the booking window. If you are interested in receiving this beta version of our product, get in touch with your account manager, who will be delighted to share this with you before adding this product to our portfolio.
We continue to manage our system performance, and I’m delighted to share that, yet again in June, we have achieved our 80% SLA goal for time to resolution on our tickets. In June, 529 tickets were raised, and we resolved 583 support and maintenance tickets. We are also reviewing some of the older tickets with customers now and are aware some of these statistics are higher than we would ideally like them to be. System stability was 100% for June and continues to be a key focus, and the improvements and investments we have made in this area have really paid off. As always, we continue to place a large emphasis on customer service and would really encourage you and your staff to rate our service in Jira as you close the tickets. Our CSAT score in June was 4.3 out of 5. Your account manager will also be in touch regarding a review of the backlog in change requests, many of these items will be reviewed as part of the scope for V2, but we do not plan to complete these jobs with the current product. There may be a few exceptions to this rule, and your account manager will be able to assist you where required.
Earlier this week, we sent out our customer service survey to all customers (and a link to the survey is included in this months Tektalk). We really welcome your feedback, and this will be the fourth time we have run this survey. We continue to invest in our team at Traveltek to strive and improve our product and service for you. We read every piece of feedback and take action on this as a business, so please do take the time to ensure you complete this for us.
Whilst the FCA has again extended the deadline for strong customer authentication and have now moved this to March 2022 (also known as 3DS2), we have been made aware of the banks doing a ‘soft decline’ on certain payments, and there is no pattern on why this is happening. The team are currently pulling together a communication on this which you will receive in the next week. Fortunately, we had completed a large amount of this work anyway. Still, these soft declines have meant we have prioritised these jobs in our supplier team as we deem this work critical to ensure business continuity for our customers.
If you have any questions about anything mentioned in this month’s Tektalk, please do not hesitate to contact your Account Manager, who will be happy to help.
As always, thank you for your continued support and stay safe everyone.
