Contact Center Pipeline December 2025 | Page 37

For more complex concerns or those requiring investigation and follow-up, our Customer Relations team works closely with employees across terminals, vessels, and other departments to provide accurate information and resolve matters effectively. Multiple teams collaborate with each other to ensure a seamless experience for our customers.

DESCRIBE YOUR AGENT HIRING, ASSESSMENT, ONBOARDING, TRAINING, AND COACHING.

Clare: We begin our seasonal hiring in January each year. We screen all applicants with a suitability questionnaire and resume reviews and bring the qualified applicants in for an interview.

Our interviews are in the background-action-result( BAR) format. We also include a written component to assess information processing and written communication.

We conduct two-three hiring classes each year, and training is six weeks long with four weeks in classroom( with weekly written assessments) and two weeks practical on the phones.

After the training period, we assess each hire’ s on-call performance on our various call types, and they must be cleared for each call type before they are considered successful through training.

Once cleared, all our agents receive monthly coaching and performance check-ins from their assigned assistant manager, and as needed coaching from our team leads.

WHAT ARE THE KEY CHALLENGES FACING THE CSC? AND HOW HAVE YOU RESPONDED?

Clare: In this type of operation, we must always deal with sailing cancelations( be they weather-related or otherwise) and we are also responding to rising costs as are all industries.

We are always looking to improve efficiency and to educate customers on self-service options. In the last five years we have gone from 75 % of bookings being made self-serve online to 90 %. We also have a very seasonal operation, so we have a large seasonal hire every year.

Fortunately, we have a wealth of historical data to draw from when trying to predict what each year may hold. We use this information, along with known planned events, to plan our team size each year, and we recruit a mix of employees who would like to stay long term and students who are looking for summer work while in school.

To combat attrition, we conduct a yearly engagement survey to understand employee pain points and work to improve them. We have made changes based on this feedback that have reduced our attrition by 33 % and improved our amount of returning seasonals by 300 %, allowing us to have much smaller seasonal hiring groups.

DO YOU BENCHMARK AGAINST OTHER SIMILAR CONTACT CENTERS?

Clare: We do benchmark against Washington State Ferries as another west coast ferry operator and Marine Atlantic on Canada’ s east coast. But we also compare ourselves to larger players in the travel industry such as WestJet and Air Canada.

" WHEN ISSUES ARISE AT THE TERMINALS OR ON BOARD VESSELS, OUR TEAM LEADS IN THE CSC ARE AVAIL- ABLE TO ASSIST [ ON-SITE STAFF AND ] CREW MEMBERS WITH CUSTOMERS..."

-- RHONDA DAYE

WHERE DOES THE CSC GO FROM HERE? WHAT ARE YOUR PLANS? ARE YOU LOOKING, FOR EX- AMPLE, TO SHORTEN THE LENGTH OF CONTACTS OR SHIFT MORE OF YOUR CONTACTS TO AUTO- MATED APPLICATIONS WITH AI?

Clare: We are investigating the applications of AI to improve our self-serve options as well as to assist our agents in finding the right information to assist callers.

We expect there will always be a need for a personal touch with more complex customer situations, but we want to make it as easy as possible for them to handle the bulk of their concerns using our self-serve offerings.

Brendan Read is Editor of Contact Center Pipeline. He has been covering and working in customer service and sales and for contact center companies for most of his career. Brendan has edited and written for leading industry publications and has been an industry analyst. He also has authored and co-authored books on contact center design, customer support, and working from home. Brendan can be reached at brendan @ contactcenterpipeline. com.

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