Big Bus Tours: Building a Unified Support Hub with Freshdesk Omnichannel

Big Bus Tours is the largest open-top sightseeing service in the world, operating in 23 cities across 4 continents. Their iconic burgundy-colored buses are a familiar sight, especially in London, where the company began. Big Bus Tours' sightseeing packages are renowned for offering a mix of educational, memorable, and culturally enriching experiences in every city they operate in. The company caters to over 7 million customers per year, and until recently, they managed their soaring query volumes with a scattered support team working out of a shared inbox.

Big Bus Tours, the world's largest open-top sightseeing service, was facing a significant challenge in managing their customer support. With a scattered support team and no visibility into customer context, they were struggling to provide a unified and efficient customer service experience. The company was also missing out on identifying revenue-generating opportunities due to the lack of data. The support team was working out of a shared inbox, which provided little to no customer context, making it difficult to manage the increasing volume of queries. The data was too siloed to offer a unified experience to both the support team and customers. The company wanted to centralize all 23 separate in-city customer service functions and create a customer service excellence center. They also wanted to give customers the opportunity to communicate through any channel they choose, including social media.

Big Bus Tours decided to deploy Freshdesk Omnichannel to build a centralized support hub. This move ensured complete visibility into customer data for the agents and offered a hassle-free mobile-first support experience to customers. All support channels, including social media, were brought to a single-view by going completely omnichannel with Freshdesk. Freshchat, a part of Freshdesk, became the preferred channel of support for customers. A bot-led workflow was integrated within Freshchat to gather customer information before routing the conversation to an agent. Freshchat’s IntelliAssign was used for its automation capabilities to unburden support. It helped assign customer queries to the right support agent based on the nature of the problem, agent availability, time zones, agent expertise, and customer’s preferred language. Big Bus Tours also used Freshdesk’s team collaboration tool, Freshconnect, to solve their biggest internal problem - cross-functional collaboration.

• The deployment of Freshdesk Omnichannel resulted in a significant improvement in Big Bus Tours' customer service operations. The company was able to centralize their support hub, ensuring complete visibility into customer data for the agents. This led to a more efficient and unified customer service experience. The use of Freshchat as the preferred channel of support for customers and the integration of a bot-led workflow helped manage query volume without overwhelming the support agents. The use of Freshconnect improved cross-functional collaboration, enabling clear communication with external stakeholders like travel advisors and partners. The company was also able to leverage analytics from Freshchat to set up better operating procedures and identify revenue opportunities.

• CSAT rating improved to 4.8/5.0

• Average number of interactions per day is 500

• Rise in CSAT after deployment was 25%