Baleària

Transforming CX in a highly complex business. Baleària emerges as leader in transportation thanks to omnichannel CX strategy.

Baleária is one of the giants of the Spanish transport industry with 1,800 employees, 30 ships, and €452 million in revenue.

They are leaders in transporting passengers and cargo between the Iberian Peninsula, the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands, and Ceuta and Melilla. They also operate internationally in three continents.

Price is their determining factor as clients expect a similar if not better experience than the provided by airlines. That is why they’ve created a customer service department focused on digitalisation to improve both customer and stakeholder satisfaction.

Main challenges

• Multiple locations: They operate in three different continents – Europe, Africa, and North America.
• Different lines of business: passenger and freight transport, hospitality and retail, servicing three different types of clients (B2C, B2B, and B2B2C).
• High dependency on high occupancy rates: to be able to minimise costs for travellers and provide them with different alternatives.

These complex conditions in a traditionally non-digitalised sector made digital transformation a must. In order to ensure a frictionless omnichannel experience.

Areas of improvement

Four areas of improvement were identified: booking experience, incident management, applying the B2C experience to B2B processes, and the consumerisation of internal B2B processes.

We worked together on an ambitious and comprehensive tactical plan to reorganise processes and implement tools to improve customer experience.

This plan was based on six tactical objectives:

• Agility in incident management
• Incorporating Robotic Process Automation (RPA) into business processes using Laiye
• Implementing omnichannel solutions
• Integrating the booking management platform
• Integrating customer data into the marketing cycle

The software solution

Zendesk and Laiye were the right software solutions to achieve all the tactical plan objectives. Covering:

• Omnichannel communication system offering customers a consistent experience at physical (ticket offices) and remote (social networks, phone or email) touchpoints.
• Knowledge bases + chatbot: providing customers with a self-service system to resolve frequent queries and reduce the workload of customer service agents.
• Back office integration: allowing customers to purchase tickets online and download electronic boarding passes via WhatsApp. Ensuring a unified experience.
• Tool consolidation: The ticket system collects all customer interactions in one place, streamlining queries, and preventing duplicate efforts.
• Centralised and efficient reporting system: simplifying reporting and providing a clear understanding of different channels’ performance immediately.

Business impact

The CX transformation process created value at three different levels:

• Customer: creating added value and driving brand image
• Employee: eliminating routine tasks to increase motivation and optimise teamwork
• Executive team: offering business data and knowledge to guide strategy and investments.

Baleària’s digital transformation took place in just 4 months. During that period, they managed to streamline and simplify processes, providing a consistently good experience across all channels.

As a result, their customer experience is now robust and omnichannel.