Miller Systems Designs and Delivers Self-Service Customer Service Experience for Vantage Deluxe World Travel

Miller Systems, one of Boston’s premier technology consulting firms specializing in the design and development of elegant user experiences, announced the completion of several new online customer service features for Vantage Deluxe World Travel.  Faced with mounting customer service call center costs and an ever-growing set of customers going online, Vantage turned to Miller Systems to design and deliver a set of web-based self-service features to the tens of thousands of customers they serve each year. Vantage is a well-respected tour operator with over 20 years of experience in creating high-quality yet affordable travel programs for mature travelers.
The key to project success was to keep the customer’s experience simple, while ensuring that the trip-related information that they view and change happen in real-time. In order to make that requirement a reality, and still ship the project within a reasonable time frame and budget, Miller Systems needed to leverage Vantage’s significant financial and human investment in their existing passenger management system.  That system resides on an iSeries legacy platform, which was not web-ready out of the box.

“In order to provide a usable experience to a constituency that’s just beginning to use the web on an everyday basis, we worked intimately with all of the representative experts at Vantage to understand the process and issues that customer service deals with every day,” said Seth Miller, Founder, and CEO of Miller Systems, Inc. “By balancing the design and experience requirements with an innovative technical solution that leverages Seagull’s LegaSuite, we were able to define, design, develop, and deliver the solution in just six months.”

In addition to the core self-service requirements, Miller Systems and Vantage took the opportunity to build measurement and analytics into the project. Leveraging the Microsoft .NET framework along with an integrated WebTrends solution enables measurement of key performance indicators (KPIs) vis a vis the web experience.

As a result, Vantage passengers can now manage their trip without customer service assistance, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.  An average passenger can make simple changes in a matter of seconds instead of dialing the call center during specified hours and waiting for a representative to help them. Popular features for passengers include: booking trip extensions, purchasing optional excursions, completing pre and post trip surveys, profile and preference management, flight change requests, along with streamlined processes and travel forms that must be completed prior to departure. It’s a win-win for Vantage and all of their customers.

“Miller Systems meticulously guided us through the complex process of web-enabling a legacy system that was never designed for customer self-service”, said Chris Bensley, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Vantage Deluxe World Travel. “Without the cross-disciplinary skill sets that the Miller team brings to the table – strategy, design, user experience, and development – we’d never have launched this project in such an aggressive time frame. The result is an improved customer experience, fewer service calls and increased revenue. Their work is world-class.”