30.8.2022
Travel Outlook, the Hotel Call Center as a Profit Hotel™ Center, is expanding the hotel sales training of its reservation specialists offered by the Kennedy Training Network (KTN).
“We’ve always used KTN’s training resources during our new hires and continuing education,” said John Smallwood, President of Travel Outlook, “But these latest enhancements from KTN take us to a whole new level of excellence, as in sales as well as in the hospitality of guests.
“This summer, we committed to having all new reservation sales specialists participate in KTN’s online, self-study version of its Reservations Sales QUEST program,” said Smallwood. “The new training emphasizes a conversational, caller-focused approach to convince today’s channel-surfing callers to book now instead of going back online.”
The course, which is fully customized for Travel Outlook and launched on Travel Outlook’s learning management platform, consists of six video-based modules that KTN President Doug Kennedy personally recorded in a studio in Los Angeles, CA. Participants also complete an online assessment and certain training activities.
Additionally, every Travel Outlook agent actively participates in a private, live four-part webcam training session as part of each introductory training class.
“What’s amazing is how Doug Kennedy can take the time to personally present three of these four pieces to our team,” says Smallwood. “New hires first meet Doug on their first day of onboarding, and meet him again later in the course when he presents a live web cam training called ‘The Whys Behind The What’s of the KTN QUEST Call Scoring Criteria.’ “
“It’s easy to make such a strong commitment of my time to personally facilitate training for a client like Travel Outlook,” says KTN President Doug Kennedy, “Because they’ve fully embraced our entire training, coaching and services suite of long-distance call evaluation.”
For Part Three, each agent experiences one-on-one training with Cathy Cook, DTM, who is KTN’s Executive Director of Training, before returning for a small group feedback session with Doug during which they talk about what has worked well and what has been their biggest challenges on their journey to sales excellence.
Given its progressive approach to the voice channel – in terms of performance, training, transparency, testing and the tools used to measure performance – Travel Outlook Premier Hotel Call Center™ is the premier voice reservations team in hospitality. Travel Outlook’s list of valued clients includes Viceroy Hotel Group, Curator, Outrigger, KSL Resorts, Proper Hospitality Group, Pacific Hospitality Group, Atlantis, The Irvine Company, Catalina Island and many more. The Travel Outlook team and approach increases sales conversion and helps create more effective voice communication between hotels and their guests, resulting in improved social outcomes in addition to increased voice revenue.
“It’s a great pleasure to work one-on-one with every new Travel Outlook agent,” says Cook, “and I think that’s because they understand how much their company is investing in their career development .”
“We are very proud to have been certified in sales excellence by the Kennedy Training Network since 2013,” added Smallwood. “I understand from Doug we are the only hotel call center with this distinction. Our clients know that our agents’ sales performance is cutting edge and always performance tested.”
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