a visit to south west london with Rosie!

Well I've been ever so busy out on the road with one of our Business Development Managers - Rosie. We went out to South West London - Kingston, Shepperton, Twickenham - all kinds of places I've never been before - there's a lovely train that took me all the way from Waterloo and as I got further out, it got greener and greener and we even went over the river a couple of times. It was nice to get away from the office for a little while and meet the people that talk to our customers on a daily basis and to get some top tips from them.


Once Rosie had picked me up from the station and I'd got over the shock of her car alarm which tends to go off sporadically - she calmed me down by feeding me percy pigs - they're very good in case you've never tried them. We programmed the sat-nav (I still don't understand those things) and it told us where our next stop was without managing to take us into too many dead ends on the way.

We spent most of the day training agents on the website - showing off all the fabulous features it has. Everyone was very friendly - and after we'd had a little chit chat about x-factor and such like important things - Rosie began the training by showing them the maps and how interactive they are. I think they were expecting the training to be a little bit dull - but when we got into this bit their ears pricked up and they started to get quite interested. You can do this thing where you click on the hotel and it just zooms around all on its own and takes you to the hotel's exact location - it also fabulously marks on the local points of interest - so if you wanted to be close to say the Eiffel Tower you could find the nearest hotels really quickly - even while the customer is on the phone and you're chatting away to them.

Rosie then moved on to the section of the site that allows you to hold rooms - pretty impressive I must say - really handy for those customers that want to go off and book a flight and then come back to confirm the hotel. It stores all their information, allows you to email the customer with all the hotel details, and then when they come back to you you just confirm it with one click of the mouse. uh huh it really was that easy.

After all the oohing and aahing from the people that Rosie was training up - quite a few others in the agency started wondering what on earth it was we were looking at on the screen. Some of them kept getting up and pretending to make a cup of tea, going the long way round so they could peer round our desk. Pretty soon there was a decent sized crowd all appearing out of the corners of the agency.


Here is Rosie:
At this point Rosie decided to show them the piece de resistance - the live help. This is like a msn messenger chat - so we logged in, and within literally 2 seconds Sandra from our Reservations team over in North London had said hello! There were a few gasps at this point and those who were pretending to make tea just ran over not caring about subtely walking over any more - they just wanted to know what the h**l was going on. So off Rosie went with her one finger typing skills and had a little chat with Sandra.

It's such a handy little part of the site - while you're on the phone to a
customer, you could chat away to one of our res team online and come up with the answer while your customer is still there! So any small amends, or any questions you have regarding availability, hotel locations - anything really - even the weather in North London - answered within seconds!

Everyone went back to their desks - and I reckon they were all just waiting for the first call so they had an excuse to chat to our team.
I was exhausted and also pretty desperate to try all these tools out for myself - I actually went home and played around on the site some more and even missed the repeat of the x-factor that I'd missed on saturday....