The tourism industry has a lot to benefit from the summer months. Tourists all over the world will be gathering at places where the weather is comparatively pleasant. That means business and revenue for the phone answering service providers. Call center units all over the world are gearing up to face a grueling schedule in summer. There will be a surge in the call volume and the inbound call center agents will be flooded with calls and queries.
To face this inundation of calls, the BPO firms handling tourism projects are pulling up their socks. As a matter of fact, it's not just the private tourism firms that are waiting to hit gold. The government sponsored tourism departments are also polishing up their call centre agents to tap every possible opportunity to generate revenue.
As an example, let us consider what the FIFA World Cup has done to the tourism sector in South Africa. The call center units handling the tourism are working overtime to meet the heavy demand. The phone answering service agents have started working round the clock to provide back-up. The answering service department has gone out of its way to include more languages so that tourists who don't speak English don't get stuck in the melee.
Tourists are there not just for the FIFA World Cup. The break doubles up as a summer vacation. The BPO firms that took up the tourism projects in South Africa had not speculated that the rush could be what it turned out to be. They had to hire business outsourcing agents during the course of the FIFA World Cup.
That brings us to a very important chapter in call center management: planning. When a BPO firm takes up a project like handling tourism, it has to consider all the implications of such a project. It has to chart out how much of a call volume they are expecting. Studies of previous records can throw considerable light on this. Find out how much the average call volume was. The next step for the phone answering service managers is to check how much of publicity the tourism department is doing.
If they are aggressively promoting tourism services, it is expected that they will reach out to higher numbers of tourists. That would further mean more calls for your inbound call center agents. Determining the number of agents you are going to hire will be a tough ask. Here, you will have to rely on statistics. Don't make it too tight for your agents. Tourists take time to register the information dished out to them. If you leave a high call volume on fewer agents, they will tend to rush and the telephone answering service will suffer.
The aim of the tourism industry in the summer months is simple: they want to make as much money as they can. Winter is lean for them. The BPO firms handling these projects have to live up to their expectations and deliver. The success will earn them international accolades.