Mass Customization
Over the years technology has replaced people in many customer interaction scenarios. That has made things very impersonal and sometimes outright frustrating. Many companies that went the route of full automation have scaled back because of the backlash and impact on customer service and experience. The real key here is to automate with a personal touch. Automate in a way as if it feels like the interface, the site, the interaction is designed especially for that one customer – just like a travel agent would do personally.

Today people don’t buy because of advertising only. More and more, people are looking affiliations and connections and even conducting business using those affiliations. So it is not surprising to see travel website designed around say surfer community. Not only their expectations are different, their language, personality, and attitude is different and a site designed in alignment with that is surely going to do more business than an impersonal transaction processing site.
With this the homogeneous markets are getting fragmented into numerous smaller affiliation groups and its associated nuances and that needs mass customization. Mass customization is when marketers can customize offerings to many groups without undue time and cost implications. It is about being able to morph on the fly.

Technology has an important role to play in this. With appropriate software travel companies should be able to deploy multiple websites targeted towards specific affiliation or target group of customers. Companies that are able to do this with very little cost and effort are the ones who will be able to reach to these fragmented market segments and grow.

Personal Experience
Even with mass customization there is a significant risk of the actual booking and support experience being very impersonal if you are not able to talk to a specific customer as if you knew him personally well. With growth of multiple systems, complex offerings, and need for one-stop solution, the customer information is getting fragmented and keeping all the pieces together is getting impossible.

Technology can help in many different ways. First of all is important to track all of the information and history of the customer interaction with your organization, without that you will find customers repeating the same information and requests and that can be outright frustrating. If you do that well, its still the basic level. What you need to do is take to a higher personal level where you understand customer preferences and take those into account at the right time. So your team needs to know simple things like seating preferences and frequent flier account information.
Going beyond that there are many other proactive service and support things your team can do which can only be enabled by technology that integrates with other systems, such as automatically alerting for flight delays or status changes which originate in other systems.
In summary, technology deployment should enable customer experience that is seamless, personal and proactive.

Visibility and Flexibility
When your organization grows, with it grows the amount of information. Making sense of this information to make business decisions becomes critical to have profitable growth. Moreover, the processes that worked over phone call or just turning around and talking to someone, just don’t work anymore.

Here technology plays a key role in creating the flexibility to manage the new processes and the proper actionable analyzed information to make good business decisions. Technology can implement appropriate workflow processes that ensure that your higher volume of business is handled efficiently without additional servicing costs. It can also give you the critical analytical insight to constantly monitor your businesses health and make decisions to grow the business profitably.

Summary
When it comes to growth, particularly in travel business, technology plays a vital role. At the same time unless the key goals of deploying the technology are clearly understood it is likely to be an expenditure that does not provide desired returns. Go ahead, make technology work for you.