Who we spoke with:
Quentin Bottner (Head of Continuous Improvement) and Jack Orbell (Continuous Improvement Consultant)
Company:
TUI Group — one of Europe’s leading travel companies, operating across 180+ destinations worldwide.
Industry:
Travel
Customer Interactions per year:
12 million
Integrations:
Zendesk
The challenge: High volumes, low clarity on what was driving them
If you work in travel, or any high-volume customer contact environment, you’ll know the feeling: thousands of customers getting in touch every day, but not enough visibility into why.
You may have broad insight into contact categories like “payments” or “bookings,” but they’re often too high-level to act on. The real issues, the ones quietly driving large volumes of contacts—stay hidden.
TUI, one of Europe’s leading travel companies, handles over 200,000 customer contacts every week, through calls, emails, and chats. The team had a general view of contact reasons, but it wasn’t detailed enough to get to the root cause of customer issues.
“We were spending a lot of time quantifying the data. And not every interaction was being categorised.”
— Jack Orbell, Continuous Service Improvement
Agents were manually applying contact reasons and writing wrap-up notes after each interaction across chat, email, and phone, which took around 30 seconds per contact, and they relied on sentiment surveys for feedback. Surveys had low response rates, and deeper analysis could take weeks.
This meant:
- Fixable issues weren’t getting prioritised
- Contact rates kept rising on avoidable topics
- Teams had to act without reliable insight
The Solution: Real-time insights & a 40% reduction in payment-related queries
To tackle the visibility gap, Quentin Bottner, Head of Continuous Improvement at TUI introduced EdgeTier’s conversation intelligence platform that helps teams understand why customers are contacting them, in real-time.
A key part of the rollout was Spotlight, EdgeTier’s root cause detection feature. It automatically analyses multiple customer interactions across call, chat, and email, and then surfaces the key issues driving contacts.
“Now we’ve got access to the data much easier. We can just go into Spotlight, see the issues, and act on them straight away.”
— Jack Orbell, Continuous Service Improvement at TUI
One of the insights Spotlight revealed was that payment-related contacts made up more than 20% of all customer contacts. Customers weren’t receiving clear confirmation after completing a payment and were getting in touch to double-check.
It was a simple communication issue, but one that had gone unnoticed and was costing money and affecting the customer experience.
Once identified, the team made a change to the confirmation message in the payment flow. The result? A 40% drop in payment-related contacts, cutting total contact volume by 7%.
Beyond root cause detection, Quentin and Jack also used EdgeTier to eliminate the need for agents to manually tag calls or send out post-call sentiment forms. Previously, this took around 30 seconds per contact, a process that added up quickly across high volumes and still left gaps in the data.
The results: Contact reduction, faster action, and customer issues being fixed
Since rolling out EdgeTier, TUI has seen measurable performance improvements:
- 40% reduction in contacts related to payment queries
- 100% of customer conversations now analysed automatically
- Reporting time reduced from 2–3 weeks to minutes
- With manual tagging removed, agents now save 30 seconds per contact — saving over 100,000 hours per year across the team
- Cross-functional teams are aligned around shared customer insight, enabling faster fixes to issues
“Now that we’ve got the insights, we can prioritise effort across the business and really target the problems our staff and customers are facing.”— Quentin Bottner
Why it matters
Every contact costs time, money, and agent capacity. But the real cost is what happens when no one acts on the insight behind them.
Conversation Intelligence has helped TUI move faster, fix issues earlier, and reduce contact volumes, all without adding pressure on agents or analysts.
“We’re a big business, so getting the right people to agree and fix something hasn’t always been easy. Now we’ve got one version of the truth—it’s much easier to align and act.” — Quentin Bottner
Ready to see what’s driving contact in your business?
We’ll walk you through the patterns we’d expect to see in your support data, and show you what we’d fix first.
