AF Travel Success Story
One inbox, one view: how AF Travel brought its team onto one shared WhatsApp inbox
Established in Kuala Lumpur
Agents working from one shared inbox
Shared inbox across every company number
Client: AF Travel
Industry: Travel and tourism
Country: Malaysia
Group: Citystate Travel Group
An established travel business in Kuala Lumpur since 1985, handling corporate travel management, group incentives, leisure travel and worldwide cruises for individual and corporate clients.
Company context
AF Travel has been an established travel business in Kuala Lumpur since 1985 and is part of the Citystate Travel Group. The agency handles corporate travel management, group incentives, leisure travel and worldwide cruises for both individual and corporate clients. Much of the team’s daily work is direct conversation with customers, answering enquiries, sending quotes and following up on bookings, increasingly communicated through WhatsApp.
Challenge
When customer chats live on personal phones, no one can see the whole picture
For years AF Travel reached customers mainly through email and EDMs. As the market shifted, replies to those emails dropped sharply and more customers preferred to communicate on WhatsApp. At first, every agent handled WhatsApp from their own phone.
That created blind spots. With a small team spread across several numbers, supervisors had no reliable way to see what was being said to customers or whether a reply was correct.
“It was difficult to monitor when everyone used an individual phone,” says Kent Chung, General Manager of the company’s Leisure Department. “Sometimes we didn’t really know what was going on.”
Worse, the same customer could message more than one number and be handled twice. As Kent puts it: “If two staff are handling two different numbers, but it is the same customer talking to them, they may not even know.” In a business where a quote or a detail has to be exactly right, there was no simple way to be sure every customer was being answered properly.
In our business, our commitment to the customer is very important. We have to make sure every piece of information and every quotation is correct. That is one of the objectives we want to achieve.
Solution
One shared inbox for every number, every agent and every conversation
AF Travel moved its WhatsApp customer service onto WOZTELL, on the WhatsApp Business Platform. Instead of scattered personal phones, the company’s numbers now sit in a single shared inbox that a team of six or seven works from together.
The difference is visibility and control. Supervisors can follow every conversation in one place and step in when something needs correcting. Conversations can also be assigned to a specific agent, and everyone works from the same view.
That shared view doubles as a coaching tool. Supervisors can see how each agent replies, catch a wrong answer early and guide new staff on the right way to respond. “It is good to identify, so we can give a correction on the spot, as a kind of staff training and monitoring,” Kent says.
AF Travel pairs WOZTELL with its existing CRM as part of its outreach. The team filters a target list of potential clients in the CRM, then brings those contacts into WOZTELL to prepare WhatsApp template messages, a more direct way to reach higher-intent leads than the email campaigns they leaned on before.
And when questions come up, the WOZTELL team is on hand.
When I face an issue, I contact the service team, and luckily we get their support very promptly. So I’m happy using it.
Results
A clearer and more consistent operation
What is already clear is the operational difference. “I can see it is improving our efficiency,” Kent says.
The team now has visibility it never had before, replies are more consistent and easier to check, and duplicated effort is easier to catch. Just as important for a travel agency, it protects the promise the team makes to every customer.
Marketing has also become more deliberate. WhatsApp messages carry a real per-message cost and travel margins are thin, so being able to segment the right audience in the CRM and reach them through WOZTELL helps the team spend where it counts. From here, AF Travel plans to lean further into template broadcasts and keep discovering features it has not tapped yet.
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