Case Study: A Leading Villa Company
Real People Offering Real Solutions
First Call Helpdesk enables villa travel company care for customers even when disaster strikes – while lightening the load for local managers.
Client: In providing out of hours support for villa users worldwide, First Call became such a part of the villa team that they took on daytime overflow too.
Villa Company Background
Michael is a travel business veteran with more than 25 years’ experience. In 2023, First Call Helpdesk helped him meet a new challenge, as Customer Care Manager in an independent, multi award winning provider of more than 2000 private villas worldwide.
Holidaymakers put trust in their travel provider, and these must care for travellers from the moment they set off until they put their bags back down at home. They want them to have a great time, of course. But they also recognise that reviews quickly expose unhappiness and impact reputation.
Support at their destination is often done through local representatives. The villa firm normally provided the names and numbers of local managers across more than 30 destinations – and this had drawbacks. “The problem with the traditional way of working was that it was impossible to manage call visibility or volumes. Customers could ring local managers at any hour of the day or night. They were effectively ‘on call’ 24×7 unless they turned their phone off completely,” Michael told us.
Meaningful understanding of customer issues was nearly impossible at head office. “We had very little visibility of the local challenges. We tried to track any actual complaints carefully, yet had no easy way of knowing or recording what people were contacting us about,” he recalled.
Small wonder that setting up a customer helpline was his very first challenge on joining.
Collaborating for Customer Care
Delivering support to customers who booked villas directly was one issue. It was even more complex if they booked via a partner – and the industry is built on collaborations. Tour operators, hotel and villa operators, airlines and others work together to bring package holidays together.
Michael’s firm had partnered with the UK’s largest tour operator which provides package holidays, including villa holidays, to millions each year. Sometimes calls would go to the tour operator directly, he explained: “The customer doesn’t care who actually operates the villa. They often call their tour operator when they have a problem. Then our partner had to contact us to get local help.”
Unsurprisingly, this major partner was keen for the villa company to establish a helpline “It had to be made easier for their staff to contact us, as well as for their customers. Instead of looking up who managed which villa, they wanted a one-stop phone number that would work for their team and any customer in any villa – whether that was in the Algarve or Florida.”
Outsourcing Overnight and Out of Hours
Michael and his Director together considered the logistics of creating a helpline: “This was a chance not just to make our managers more efficient, but also create more usable management data – and this was an opportunity to provide help overnight, too,” he stated.
Setting up a helpline in-house during the UK working day was manageable, but staffing an overnight one would be far harder, they realised: “We had no idea how many calls we might get overnight. We had no management information to go on, and were worried about the recruitment challenges involved.”
Outsourcing overnight support seemed smart, but Michael admits to not knowing quite where to start. After much internet searching and asking contacts for suggestions, he had a list of five out of hours support service providers to speak with.
He quickly realised that big wasn’t necessarily beautiful. A huge provider with 5000 people who could potentially answer the phone, or an enormous offshore call centre, was not what they wanted. The list was whittled down to First Call because: “When we met Jane and Joe at First Call Helpdesk, I instantly saw that they knew exactly what they were doing. They were not only nice, genuine people but their service contrasted massively with the other providers.”
Finding the right cultural and customer care fit were key: “As an owner-managed firm First Call fitted us better. They are established, but small enough that a customer would have a real chance of speaking to the same person more than once, and would never get lost in a queue.”
Michael described how its leadership lent confidence: “Jane brought the care and commitment we wanted to support our customers. Joe was excellent on the technical side. He was the first to suggest they could work on our system directly. That eliminated any need to export information or reports.”
First Call’s flexible financial model could adapt costs to actual call volumes. He recalled “First Call’s charging model was great. Other firms wanted to charge significant retainers, as they didn’t know how many calls they would get – while First Call offered reasonable monthly fees and per-call charges.”
Starting The Journey Together
First Call worked to learn about all the support challenges that travel presents. Michael reflected, “We took time to train them and make sure things were being logged correctly. They had to get up to speed on typical issues – like when a customer is driving in the dark trying to find a villa, or loses the door key code.”
After the initial training, he remembered that “It suddenly clicked. We got to a point where our customers would never know they are talking to someone outside the company. That immediately gave flexibility. In Summer there is a big increase in bookings, so staff are under pressure. Soon we could use First Call for overflow during the day. They became like extra members of staff who are on hand if we need them.”
Working directly with the business’ system provided First Call with what they needed. “We had a vast knowledgebase of information about each villa, spanning everything from which way to turn the switch on the air conditioning to the Wi-Fi code,” he said.
While First Call could answer most queries, some issues needed special attention, such as a burglary. “We created a simple escalation matrix for serious issues, which gets the local manager engaged fast so they can visit and provide help, involving a regional manager if necessary,” Michael told us.
Reporting frequency was part of the original discussions, but this was unnecessary. “Because First Call Helpdesk used our system, we could run reports ourselves. We set our system up to report automatically each morning and could see immediately how many new cases had come up the previous night.”
Help When The World's on Fire
Unfortunately, dealing with crisis is a common challenge, Michael observed. “Every now and then, something horrible goes wrong in the travel industry – think of COVID, the Icelandic ash cloud, terrorist alerts around Christmas markets or the New Orleans floods.”
In 2023, many villa customers encountered the devastating Rhodes wildfires and needed significant help in the moment. First Call helped them cope not only with evacuation but confused communications that saw some being allowed to return, only to be told that they must evacuate again as the winds shifted.
Inundating the local manager with calls would not have provided the necessary support, Michael said. “Had we not had First Call supporting us overnight, the only thing customers evacuated from villas at risk would have had was the local manager’s number. She was in a similar position, having been evacuated from her own home. Even if she had been able to take calls easily, she could only have taken one at a time.”
In his opinion, crises really show the value of helplines: “The best customer support approach in an emergency is unquestionably to take all calls centrally. That way the local manager can gather intelligence on the ground and feed in to call handlers who can help more people, faster.”
Even on what seem normal days, Michael feels that the centralisation of calls also allowed them to see patterns, or even spot when a big issue was brewing “If First Call suddenly has 50 calls waiting, they know there’s something happening and can raise the alarm rapidly.”
Everyone Feels The Benefit of Better Communication
The central helpline had direct quality of life benefits for local managers, who no longer got midnight calls about minor items. Michael explained that “Once we had a 24-hour helpline in place, managers could get a good night’s sleep, and concentrate on visiting villas, dealing with resort issues, and checking on customers. The travel industry often relies too much on the goodwill of its staff – our overseas team was delighted when they could take two full days off without the spectre of interruptions.”
It enabled the managers to focus instead on quality improvement too, he observed: “We wanted managers to visit villas and do quality checks more often. When they were freed from answering calls about the location of the cutlery or how to find the nearest bar, they had time to make sure the pools were cleaned.”
Centralisation also gives companies the ability to improve processes. “If you know the ten most often requested pieces of information, you can design information cards to make those immediately visible on arrival,” Michael said.
Above all, the benefits of easy, round the clock support access were felt by customers. “First Call were instrumental in improving our customer experience, and making sure issues were resolved quickly. Our speed of response improved massively, complaints went down, and we could also track issues so that nobody’s problem was ever missed or forgotten.”
Reflecting on the choice, Michael said “We felt we could trust First Call, not just with the service delivery but our reputation. They had to be professional, extremely adaptable, and they proved very much up to the challenge. They did all we needed, and more.”
Michael's Conclusion
First Call Helpdesk
“Customer care is how you differentiate yourself in the travel business. Travellers want and need to be looked after – and it doesn’t matter what time of day or night they need help. If I was looking for a company to support customer service, First Call would be top of my list. They allowed me and my colleagues to sleep easy at night.”
