GM Tour: From disparate channels to seamless, efficient customer service with Zendesk

From a humble three-person start, Thai travel agency GM Tour has grown to become Thailand’s leading wholesale and business travel agency. Three decades after its founding, GM Tour’s robust 60-member team now serves over 2,000 clients, overseeing a vast product portfolio that handles end-to-end processing of flights, hotels, insurance, and visas on a large scale.

A patchwork of channels and conversations

In an industry with razor-thin profit margins, deploying multiple teams to handle constant communication and operations no longer made operational sense. To resolve this, GM Tour urgently needed to streamline customer service. “We had 60 agents with separate email addresses, emailing back and forth without a clear standard and unable to track who had communicated with which client,” recalls Kit Sananwathananont, managing director at GM Tour. “We wanted to consolidate all support channels so that our customers didn’t always have to reach out to the same staff member, who might be on leave.

GM Tour had tried a number of ticketing systems, but they lacked integration. Kit describes, “Some didn’t offer reports, some weren’t widely used globally, and others weren’t user-friendly. These issues seemed unfixable, which impacted our ability to serve clients.”

Dipping their toes in the new platform

Thankfully, “Zendesk seemed to address these issues from the get-go,” Kit recalls. Inspired by recommendations from partners and customers, GM Tour decided to give Zendesk a try. “We soon saw that not only did it address our immediate problems, but with its customer-first approach, it also empowered us to achieve more than we anticipated,” explains Kit.

With support and guidance from the Zendesk team, GM Tour started its migration to the new platform. “The Zendesk customer success team gave us invaluable suggestions and prompted us to think differently,” shares Kit. Anticipating internal resistance, the company initially left it up to the agents to choose their preferred tools.

“Over time, our team realized the benefits and simplicity of Zendesk and they embraced the platform,” recalls Kit. “Realizing that the structure reduces human errors significantly, they started trusting Zendesk for all communication and team collaborations.”

Consolidating and standardizing communications

Today, in place of a jumbled collection of channels and emails, a single ticketing system handles all customer interactions. “It’s like a factory assembly line, with faster and more standardized communication,” Kit says. “Each case is assigned a ticket number, a category, and details about the personnel involved. We can track its progress, assign different statuses, and efficiently manage each case. Internal notes further enhance our organizational capabilities.”

To standardize workflows and minimize human errors further, GM Tour started leveraging triggers, reminders, and macros (prepared responses or actions) wherever possible.

Next, GM Tour set out to address customer inquiries proactively. By creating a help center with videos, articles, and links at various touchpoints, website visitors can now serve themselves more effectively. “Previously, a lot of time was spent in back-and-forth communication before action could be taken, and customers couldn’t perform certain functions themselves on our website,” Kit explains. “With our help center, we’ve educated our clients on what they need to submit for each transaction.”

“We’ve designed sample emails and embedded easy-to-use forms, reducing communication delays. We’ve also integrated conditional processing. When users submit a request, they can give us specific types of information for it to be processed immediately, unless they’d like us to process it manually if they’re unsure of what information to provide,” Kit says.

Building, learning, iterating

To enable continuous improvement of workflows, GM Tour also started relying on insights for tasks like identifying common issues, tracking crucial performance indicators, and assessing processes. “We appreciate detailed reports that show how each team is working,” explains Kit. “For instance, one staff member might have different working patterns for different customer types. We like that granularity, and that we can access this data on our own without requesting assistance from Zendesk.”

After standardizing, centralizing, and streamlining customer service, GM Tour has seen a remarkable rise in team efficiency. “Our agents can process tasks systematically and with great speed. They are well-informed about their case status, eliminating much of the back-and-forth,” shares Kit.

With a more capable website and expanded automation, GM Tour’s staff can focus on more individual client requests that need a human touch. “Each staff member can now manage 44 percent more cases. Even though our sales volume has increased by over 30 percent annually, our operational staff count remains almost the same,” adds Kit.

Building trust with customers

The real winners of this journey are the customers themselves. The median time for full resolution of a ticket has been reduced from 18.4 to 1.4 hours, and processing a refund takes only six days instead of 60 to 75 days.

“Our customers have been a lot happier since we deployed Zendesk, reaching a customer satisfaction (CSAT) score of 95 percent,” says Kit. “Most importantly, our customers feel confident that their concerns will be addressed promptly by a competent team in accordance with our service agreement, which is crucial for our business model.”

Now that GM Tour is ready for scale, it has renewed its commitment to continuous improvement. “We feel like we’re not yet leveraging Zendesk’s full potential,” shares Kitt. “We want to further integrate communication channels with Zendesk, make better use of triggers and automation, and proactively reach out to clients based on the data we have. The idea of incorporating chatbots and artificial intelligence (AI) intrigues us.”

“Ultimately, our goal is to integrate more of our backend and sales solutions into Zendesk to empower our staff further,” Kit concludes.