Case Study: Carnival UK

CUSTOMER PROFILE

Across more than a million guest interactions a year, the Carnival UK contact center team manages all sales, pre-cruise, and post-cruise queries for Cunard, famous for its luxury voyages, and P&O Cruises, Britain's biggest cruise line. The contact center's outdated, disconnected tools were hindering sales and compounding frustration among agents and guests. In recent years, P&O Cruises and Cunard have added three new ships to its fleet requiring the servicing of thousands of additional guests, therefore the company implemented NICE CXone to connect and modernize its digital foundation to power automation, efficiencies, and data-driven decisions at all levels of the organization.

01 THE BEFORE

Losing leads in a competitive travel marketplace

Carnival UK’s contact center tools and outdated legacy platform were far from seaworthy. While its contact center operations were buoyed by the addition of NICE IEX Workforce Management (WFM) features in February 2024, its voice channel was unmonitored outside of manual transcriptions. Digital channels were siloed and limited to email, and a lack of visibility into the entire guest contact journey was stunting sales and inhibiting the contact center’s potential to deliver value to the enterprise at large.

"We lost a lot of leads because we didn't know who guests were when they called. We didn't have information on their previous touchpoints," explained Contact Center Director Jon Wells.

02 DESIRE TO CHANGE

Transforming people, processes, and technology to accommodate growth

Carnival UK has added new ships to its fleet in recent years which has naturally increased guest demand into the contact centre. This growth called for an evolved guest experience, one that led with digital without increasing the cost of service. “In its simplest terms, we needed to move from a disconnected contact center to omnichannel operations with visibility of all guest contacts in a single solution,” said Jon Wells.

Its legacy, on-premise solution wasn’t suited to deliver the elevated experience at scale that Carnival UK required. A transformation program team was initiated to execute change across the contact center's people, processes, and technology in pursuit of improved guest experiences, increased revenue contribution, optimized costs, improved guest and business insights, and enhanced agent experiences.

Carnival UK turned to NICE to help build a digital foundation that could support people, processes, and technology to chart a sustainable path to the cloud.

03 THE SOLUTION

A seamless transition thanks to champions of change

Based on positive experiences with WFM and NICE Value Realization Services, Carnival UK selected CXone and established a pilot team of 25 people representing all employment levels and contact center departments in order to test all communications, training, and functionality before full scale deployment. Carnival UK worked with NICE to build a comprehensive solution that could scale and evolve. To start, CXone would deliver new channels for interactions, improve reporting quality and efficiencies, and enable smarter, higher-level agent performance with bot-assisted self-service and a robust, intuitive knowledge management solution and guest view.

The program team included a communications specialist who helped secure buy-in for the transformation both at the user level and in the C-suite by establishing and maintaining lines of communication across bi-monthly email updates, face-to-face meetings with senior leaders, a regularly updated SharePoint site, and a two-way feedback mechanism between the organization and the pilot team. “Our pilot team was incredibly successful,” said Wells. “It enabled us to not only test the tech and how it worked but to test our training at the same time. Based on that feedback, we continuously improved throughout the phased training processes.”

The contact center team engaged a small group of employees called Change Champions. This group supported the critical middle ground between front line users and the fully enmeshed program team. This team helped anchor the program team with realistic feedback and added additional support to front line employees.

04 THE RESULTS

Collaborating across people, processes, and tech

“We expected the transition into the cloud to have had more challenges, but we have been pleasantly surprised by user adoption of CXone and NICE Workforce Management solutions. We were able to take control of reporting and administration very quickly,” said Wells.

Once the cut-over day arrived, Carnival UK’s robust communications, cross-functional support, continuously improving training sessions, and a celebratory spirit engendered by parties, prizes, and incentives, paved the way for a seamless transition.

CXone generated immediate gains and long-term scalability. Artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled features, including Enlighten Autopilot for voice and Enlighten Copilot, will immediately allow Carnival UK to be more efficient.

“This will enable us to utilize our full workforce more strategically,” said Wells. “This will allow us to implement outbound calling based on abandoned carts, for example, or inform what might be a more time-consuming upsell opportunity that is ultimately well worth it in terms of increased sales.”

While the contact center had originally been organized by channel, “It wasn’t designed that way, it just evolved that way,” explained Wells—agents are now skilled, and calls are routed based on whether the request is related to a pre-cruise or post-cruise activity. Within those skills, calls can be routed more effectively, with high-potential pre-cruise calls connected to higher-performing sales agents. Most critically, data gathered in any type of engagement is automatically converted into critical business insights from solutions like Enlighten Autosummary among others.

The introduction of digital channels, specifically live chat, and the integrated guest dashboard are expected to dramatically improve sales conversion. While Carnival UK was only capturing and analyzing one out of every 50 voice engagements in the past (through a process that was manually informed on an agent’s best-guess opinion) CXone’s AI-powered sentiment analysis is also expected to deliver major gains to the business in the form of guest insights. “Particularly as we grow, the insights we’re gathering related to what guests look for in a cruise, or their experiences on board or with the website, are so valuable: We should be a mine of information back to the business,” explained Wells.

05 THE FUTURE

Advancing an AI roadmap

“The elements of AI that are embedded in NICE solutions meant we were able to advance on our AI roadmap further than we had anticipated,” said Wells.

Next on Carnival UK's AI roadmap is the introduction of proactive outbound capabilities with predictive dialer and digital outreach. Carnival UK is also deploying Employee Engagement Manager (EEM) and cobrowser experiences, and will continue to work with NICE Value Realization Services to drive transformation strategy, change management, adoption and value measurement.