Testimony by Jason Kugel, Armatis Project Manager on behalf of Pierre et Vacances Center Parcs

Testimonial from Jason Kugel, Armatis Project Manager on behalf of Pierre et Vacances Center Parcs.

Established in Avoriaz in 1967, Pierre & Vacances is Europe’s leader in leisure and holidays.

Every year, the brand welcomes over 2 million holidaymakers in more than 150 residences and over 12,300 apartments in France and Europe.

Pierre & Vacances Center Parcs has outsourced part of its customer relations to Armatis in France and Portugal since 2017.

Jason, you’re Project Manager for the Pierre et Vacances Center Parcs partnership, what does your job consist of?

I coordinate Pierre et Vacances Center Parcs’ Sales and Aftersales productions in France and Portugal. I divide my time between Portugal and France with the aim of homogenising production, quality and performance as well as stimulating synergies between the various sites.

Together with my teams, we spend a lot of time benchmarking our competitors and listening to customers, and feed information back to our partner with a view to taking the best decisions in terms of customer experience.

It’s a hybrid position adapted to multisite operations, enabling efficient coordination of operations and projects. As a result, I have an overall view of problems encountered, performances and customer verbatims.

This simplifies and fluidifies exchanges for my partner Pierre et Vacances Center Parcs, as I’m their preferred entry point for operational questions.

On what criteria do you base recruitment of advisors for Pierre et Vacances Center Parcs in order to ensure promotion of over 12,300 apartments in France and Europe?

Seasonality is very important in the tourist sector: numbers of contacts vary from 30% to 60% in the high season (June – August and January – March/April).

So we’ve got two main recruitment periods for these activities. The first in May, before the summer season, and the second in October, before the winter season.

When we bring in new employees before the summer season, for example, we focus our skills acquisition programme on coastal destinations. Conversely, for the winter season, we focus on apprehension of “skiing” destinations and their specificities (ski lifts, slopes, activities, etc.).

This enables our employees to develop their skills in two phases.

Our experience has taught us that the qualities required to be a successful travel advisor include advisory capacities, empathy, sympathy and knowledge of the sector, tourism knowhow.

The health crisis has had a major impact on activities in the tourism and leisure sector. What changed for you and how did you adapt to the situation?

Initially, our relations with end customers were totally upended, a real change of paradigm: we sold dreams, holidays, joyful experiences, and from one day to the next we had to switch to managing the unknown, anxiety.

Our advisors had to adapt quickly in order to take care of and lend support to Pierre et Vacances Center Parcs customers during this period. We set up telework at the same time.

Our first job was to listen to customers, respond to all their requests (modifications, cancellations, reimbursements and queries) and document them. To this end, we got all our advisors working on “after-sales” contacts, which totalled almost 7 contacts per hour per advisor.

We then worked with our partner on various scenarios, on the basis of 50,000 contacts in March 2020 during the first lockdown, with the aim of adapting processes and rules as required in order to best respond to our customers’ new expectations.

We’re very proud that we were able to stand by our partner and its customers during this difficult period. We even won all the Pierre & Vacances service-provider awards for having been a responsive and flexible powerhouse of ideas.

Pierre et Vacances Center Parcs now provides its customers with a very agile offer: they can cancel up to 2 days before departure date, which reassures them as they can think farther ahead.

Last but not least, we gained in flexibility and skills!

Customer satisfaction is central to your discussions with Pierre et Vacances Center Parcs. In your opinion, has the challenge been met?

Yes, and the figures go to prove it!

In addition to the quality of Pierre & Vacances Center Parcs’ products and services, customers expect agility, flexibility and reimbursement possibilities. And that’s exactly what we provide with Pierre et Vacances Center Parcs!

Summer saw a resumption of activity and we achieved record booking levels: we made a whole summer’s turnover in June alone!

In point of fact, the Group has recorded a 17.3% increase in tourism activities compared with the same quarter of the previous financial year, and a 2.2% increase compared with summer 2019. (Figures published in Capital.fr on 19 October 2021).

What are your goals and results? What are you doing to achieve them?

“Goals? We smash them!”

I’m not joking, with Pierre et Vacances Center Parcs, sales performance is no longer a subject, we don’t even talk about it anymore at steering committee meetings!

We worked on several substantive issues in order to obtain these results, including:

• Replay and analysis of “lost sales opportunities”, basing ourselves on short APT (average processing time) calls, using Speech Analytics software provided by our partner Batvoice;
• Improvement of “First Call Resolution”
• Automatic relaunches of optional reservations

As regards After-Sales Service, we’ve recorded the best performances at Europe level on “First Call Resolution”.

Our performance is the result of major work on anticipation of and response to needs not expressed by customers, with no increase in average processing time.

“First Call Resolution” is a key indicator of performance and customer satisfaction, which we monitor on a weekly basis: supervisors listen to 10 callback chains a week, enabling us to identify reasons for callbacks as well as employees needing support.

Our “After-Sales” advisors are also challenged on this indicator in the same way as “Sales” advisors are on conversion.

One figure illustrating our results: 2% fewer calls and 10% more turnover versus A-1!

What’s your secret for achieving such results?

The secret’s a close-knit, caring, passionate and fully involved team!

We’ve got a hard core of loyal advisors on this activity, who share their knowledge and best practices.

We make sure to apply a form of management that fosters self-fulfilment and empower advisors accordingly: they’re autonomous, they take decisions, they help each other, they manage their own performances, they make impartial qualitative assessments, and they devise action plans to implement in order to achieve their goals.

One last question, how would you describe your partner Pierre et Vacances Center Parcs?

In my opinion, they’re an open-minded, innovative partner, close to their customers and partners, and determined to ensure ongoing improvement of the Customer Experience.

In a nutshell, they’re a partner that never stops. 😊