Costa Cruises sets sail, responds to inbound messages 25% faster with the same crew
The Challenge
For 75 years, Costa has been taking its guests to explore beautiful destinations around the world. With ten ships in service operating on five continents, the cruise line sees a lot of activity on its social media channels.
With Sprinklr Service, my team of community specialists can handle a greater volume of inbound messages in the same amount of time. This means I can fully optimize our resources while improving both the customer and the agent expexrience.”
Head of Customer Satisfaction and Operations , Costa Cruises
Guests and prospective guests comment on Costa’s social posts, they ask questions about trips and fares, share concerns and send direct messages. Costa’s community management team was managing the company’s social accounts with legacy software that did not integrate with the company’s CRM or with WhatsApp — a channel that’s become increasingly important for the Italian market.
“Every agent had to moderate comments on the different platforms that we had,” explains Head of Customer Satisfaction and Operations Antonella Clari. Switching between screens was time-consuming for agents. It slowed the pace of customer service and made it difficult to manage cases and measure performance.
Together with the global social media team, Clari looked for a new solution that would:
- Integrate with more social channels, enabling Costa to engage with and assist customers across channels
- Allow for consistent, comprehensive reporting and data analysis
- Integrate all channels onto the same platform to provide a unified customer view for personalized interactions, streamline workflows and foster coordinated efforts to deliver exceptional customer experiences across all touchpoints
The Solution
Costa’s global social media and community management teams selected Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform.
Sprinklr’s solution responded to immediate concerns about channel coverage and a possible future CRM integration, Clari says. The company first unified its community management team onto Sprinklr Social, then expanded to include Sprinklr Service and Sprinklr Insights.
Centralized content management
Today, Costa uses Sprinklr to manage its social media presence by country, maintaining 8 accounts across X (formerly known as Twitter), Facebook and Instagram. Social Publishing & Engagement supports the Global Social Media team in optimizing their posts and collaborating with external partners and analyze insights.
Simplified, multi-channel community management
Initially, the community management team headed by Antonella Clari had planned to use Sprinklr Social for community engagement, but Clari quickly realized her team would benefit from a more robust solution. With Sprinklr Service, her team would have enhanced customer support capabilities, streamlined case management and effective multichannel customer engagement. The first step for Clari was to enable her community managers to engage with customers on all channels and have that engagement tracked and measured in one place — which is something that was not possible with the legacy software the team had been using.
"Now, all conversations that we have take place inside a case, and all cases live on the Sprinklr platform,” says Clari. “This makes it much easier for our community managers to effectively engage with the community.”
Rules prioritize cases for faster response times
Costa’s community management team engages with guests and prospective guests on a wide variety of topics, including questions about itineraries and life on board the vessels. Sprinklr's Rule Engine has become a valuable tool that assists the team in effectively prioritizing those messages. By configuring Rules, Clari’s team now identifies and prioritize cases using specific keywords, streamlining their workflow and ensuring that important messages are delivered to available agents and receive prompt attention.
“We want to strengthen our community by providing a faster and more efficient service through a carefully designed, effective and customer-tailored experience,” explains Clari.
Reporting provides comprehensive view of customer engagement
Automated reporting within Sprinklr Service provides Clari with a comprehensive view of both the Costa community members with whom her team engages – and the community specialists' performance.
“Sprinklr Service helps us to quickly understand why people are contacting us on digital channels and to quickly assist them. But reporting enables us to drill down further,” explains Clari. Sprinklr reports provide a 360-degree view, enabling Clari to look at the cases her managers have handled in aggregate as well as in detail.
“We can understand their sentiment, what they’re thinking, how we’re helping them, and how we can better help them in the future with the aim of placing the customer experience at the center, more and more,” she says.
Automated reporting empowers Clari and her team to better manage the community on digital channels by providing real-time insights, support trend identification, and SLA compliance tracking. This enhances the overall customer experience for the Costa community and fosters higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Close partnership ensures Sprinklr platform is optimized for Costa
Clari says her team’s success with Sprinklr is thanks, in large part, to a close partnership with the managed services team. With a sharp focus on improving the customer experience across digital channels, it can be difficult to also learn the ins and outs of a comprehensive platform. She appreciates Sprinklr’s attentive approach to her team's requirements and willingness to optimize solutions to their specific needs.
“We continue to work together to optimize our use of the platform, so that we can provide better service to our customers and get even better performance from our agents,” says Clari. "It's really a great collaboration.”
The Outcome
Since implementing Sprinklr Service, Clari’s lean team of five employees has been able to respond to more inbound messages across digital channels than ever before — while improving case management duration and customer satisfaction.
First response time has improved by 25 percent and average case handling time is 10 percent faster. Best of all, agents’ net promoter score (NPS) has been consistently over 70 for more than eight months.
“With Sprinklr Service, my team of community managers can handle a greater volume of inbound messages in the same amount of time,” says Clari. "This means I can fully optimize our resources while improving both the customer and the agent experience.”