Tourism staff turnover: the surprising reputation risk

As a sector, tourism has always had a high staff turnover, sometimes as high as 50 per cent for many companies — as much as five times the Australian average across all sectors.

But for an industry that relies on customer relationships, that loss of experience, intellectual property and customer engagement is an enormous risk for business when it walks out the door.

That’s where a strong partnership with a customer experience expert makes the difference.

Pandemic pain continues to linger for tourism

The challenge of high tourism staff turnover has never been more evident than right now.

COVID cut a swathe through the tourism sector, which has struggled to make up ground since the pandemic.

With both international tourism vanishing overnight, and domestic tourism struggling with lockdowns and border closures, many tourism operators let go of most, if not all, staff.

Overall, it’s thought the sector lost as many as 300,000 workers.

While we can’t yet call our current situation post-pandemic, the sector has seen a sharp upturn in customer interest.

Pent-up demand is obvious, with domestic travellers in Australia spending $5.2 billion in February – remarkably, up 11 per cent on the same time in 2020.

But the losses of experienced staff and labour shortages in many tourism operators put the hopes of recovery at risk.

Operators have struggled with recruitment, onboarding and training new staff, troubleshooting IT issues and other operational challenges, not to mention handling a huge volume of customer enquiries.

If customers can’t get through on the phone, can’t get help without waiting for hours, or can’t book and pay for travel and holidays, it hits both business reputation and the bottom line.

How can a better customer contact approach help?

Customer satisfaction and staff-client relationships are critical as the tourism sector seeks to make up for time lost to the COVID-19 pandemic.

One tourism business came to TSA Group for help as they battled a severe staff shortage and a large backlog of email and phone requests. It was a scenario that left customers caught in the middle facing a poor experience.

But with high levels of uncertainty and an increasingly tight job market, it was important that the people representing our client’s brand would be able to get up to speed without delay.

We worked with the client to support a training program that would help onboard staff more quickly and give people who had been out of the industry for a while a quick-start overview of what they needed to provide excellent customer care.

With TSA taking care of the contact centre solution and technology, our client could now focus their internal staff’s attention towards on-site services.

The result was a scalable solution for a client who might otherwise still be struggling to fill the roles and bring training up to speed, possibly losing customer confidence in the process.

Connecting with an outsourced customer experience business, such as TSA, creates a partnership for developing training materials, back-office systems and call centre solutions to complement your workforce.

Through innovative solutions, businesses can cut overhead costs and drive results, reducing wastage and saving valuable time. The result is a seamless blending of back and front office operations that help deliver a better customer experience.

Delivering quality training materials is crucial. Comprehensive analysis helps businesses discover what they really need to produce better job-ready staff who can integrate faster and boost earnings.

Our Learning and Development team is skilled in training and onboarding processes that can be easily scaled to suit the size of the business, ensuring our clients have access to best-in-class training solutions.

TSA Group is Australia’s market-leading CX Consultancy and Contact Centre Services specialist. Get in touch with us today and find out how we can help your business create customer experiences that people love.