Timeshare companies sometimes get a bad rap as not being particularly customer centric. Many consumers associate them with high-pressure sales tactics meant to feed a volume business, rather than crafting hyper-personalized experiences that build loyalty. But Holiday Inn Club Vacations embraces a different philosophy.

Nicole Myers acknowledges the preconceptions people may have but, as vice president of customer experience for the brand, she leads a team devoted to elevating CX every day.

Florida-based Holiday Inn Club Vacations dates back to 1952 when the first Holiday Inn Hotel opened. It’s a resort, real estate, travel, and timeshare company that operates 30 resorts throughout the United States and Mexico and has more than 365,000 members and timeshare owners. 

The company has always aimed to deliver great experiences for travelers, but CX efforts have really moved to the forefront since President and CEO John Staten joined the brand several years ago. Myers is the company’s first vice president of CX and has held the role for five years.

“On our strategy roadmap, the No. 1 strategy pillar is growing guest love,” Myers said. “We are customer obsessed. At every interaction point, everyone understands how their role impacts the customer.”

The brand’s leaders view CX as a differentiator in their industry. In 2024, the company was recognized by J.D. Power for the third consecutive year for providing outstanding customer service via phone support. 

Timeshare owners – many of whom have longstanding relationships with the company – expect a bespoke experience each time they visit a resort or interact with the brand, Myers said, so customer satisfaction requires constant attention and innovation.

Always listening and learning

The brand strives to gauge customer sentiment as often as possible, which involves collecting and analyzing a lot of data, Myers said. The company collects feedback on timeshare villas, down to specific rooms, through customer surveys and in-depth interviews with owners and visitors during and after their stays. 

When a particular villa or collection of rooms performs well, the brand wants to know why. Conversely, when certain ones have challenges – visitors complain about outdated TVs, for instance – customer feedback helps identify problems and inform decision making. All sites periodically undergo major renovations, and guest feedback always plays an important role in those decisions. 

“We do lots of testing like that so we’re able to figure out where to best maximize investments,” Myers said.

Customers and members typically are very willing to share data with the company if they believe that doing so will result in a better experience, she said. Among timeshare owners, the company has a 96% response rate to interviews and 34% response rate to surveys. 

“They’re invested with us,” Myers said of owners’ willingness to share their opinions. “This is a long-term purchase for them.”

She noted that Holiday Inn Club Vacations isn’t just “listening for listening’s sake;” it’s turning insights into actions. 

“We find major touchpoints throughout our journey” she said, gathering feedback along the way.

Knowing customers’ habits and preferences well is essential to delivering a great experience, and collecting so many data points helps the company market certain offers and resort locations to customers, creating a more personalized experience. 

“We know who you are and what you tend to like,” she said. “We listen, we learn. We really dig into the data.” 

Investing in AI-powered CX  

Digital transformation is another CX priority for the company as Holiday Inn Club Vacations adapts to meet changing customer preferences.

Historically, many customers preferred to speak with someone by phone when they had an inquiry, Myers said, but modern travelers want more options. The company plans to add email and live chat support channels based on customer feedback. 

As the company continually seeks ways to improve CX, AI plays an increasingly important role in the contact center. 

The brand uses conversational AI to listen to customer interactions. Not only does it uncover how customers are truly feeling during conversations, but it identifies associates’ strengths and weaknesses that can then be reinforced or addressed as needed, Myers said. 

“The greatness about that tool is it uncovers real-time sentiment,” she said, adding it also helps with compliance requirements. “It’s an amazing tool that allows supervisors to listen in real time.”

Team leads have dashboards that give them quick, easy access to huge volumes of data. They can see how associates are performing and identify patterns, including cues of when customers are frustrated. Then they can use those insights to hyperfocus and accelerate coaching and make it much more effective. 

AI tools also let supervisors watch many associates at once, which is especially helpful because many Holiday Inn Club Vacations associates work remotely, Myers said. The company employs a mix of remote and on-site contact center employees, and associates must earn their way to a remote position after they’ve been with the company long enough.

With AI, supervisors can maintain a holistic view of how associates are performing, regardless of where they’re located.

The brand also uses AI to analyze sentiment, themes, and topics during interactions, and to identify key drivers – which can vary at each of its 30 resorts. The resulting insights improve contact center operations and informs the company’s marketing efforts as well. 

Not all associates were quick to embrace AI from the outset, Myers acknowledged. Some were hesitant, or even skeptical, and questioned how it would impact their day-to-day jobs. But they’ve seen firsthand how things like real-time prompts and agent-assist tools have made their work easier and improved employee experience.

“(AI) just makes everyone’s performance better,” she said. “They love it.”

Customer centered, future focused

There’s always more work to be done when it comes to improving customer experience, Myers said. Looking ahead, she expects AI to play a growing role in CX efforts. In particular, the company aims to collect more customer feedback and sentiment during interactions and to enhance its knowledgebase so associates have faster, easier access to the information they need.

Short-term plans include adding more self-service support options, such as chatbots, and expanding omnichannel offerings. 

The company’s mission is to be the most loved brand in family travel. At the core of that mission, Myers said, is delivering the type of personalized, exceptional experiences that keep customers coming back – one stay at a time.

Photos courtesy of Holiday Inn Club Vacations

When I first began working with contact center professionals over a decade ago, I received some great advice I still use. Whenever I call customer service, I remember the name of the associate when they introduce themselves so I can call them by name during our interaction. 

Associates appreciate it because it shows that I see them as a person and not a faceless voice on the other end of the line. It also personalizes the conversation and makes it less scripted and robotic. Ultimately, I hope it makes the call a little smoother and gives associates more confidence because they are being seen.

It’s a very small gesture, but it goes a long way. Just like empathy from associates helps customers feel seen and appreciated. It’s a two-way street.

When a call goes well, I always thank the associate by name at the end of the interaction so they know I appreciate their help. Because while it’s important to build rapport, what I really want is my question answered or my problem resolved. 

And I’m not alone. TTEC recently conducted a LinkedIn poll about customers’ top priorities when they interact with customer service. Of the 548 responses:

• 44% want quick issue resolution
• 33% want to feel valued
• 17% want to feel understood
• 6% do not want to repeat themselves

So while empathy and understanding are important, action comes first. Empathetic responses and apologies prolong resolution times, which can frustrate customers and do more harm than good if they just want a quick fix.

Our Customer Strategist Journal cover story dives into this notion in more detail, illustrating how the amount of empathy and effort you put into customer interactions is dependent on the types of calls and the expectations of different customers. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to empathy. Also, advances in AI and customer analysis can help right-size the empathy equation for individual customers at scale. 

It’s just one article in an issue that focuses on how to meet or exceed customer expectations without breaking the bank. 

Enjoy the issue!

Businesses across every vertical — from retail to banking, healthcare to high tech and travel — might want to take a cue from fraudsters. In a word: Data. 

Scammers have been very successful at account takeovers (up 56%) and chargebacks (up 78%) in the past year, thanks to the robust data sets they are exploiting. Business would do well to step up their game and expand how they source and mine data, according to two experts sharing fraud mitigation insights and strategies on the LinkedIn Live webinar, “Securing trust: Tackling digital payment fraud while elevating CX,” hosted by TTEC and moderated by 1to1 Media’s Elizabeth Glagowski.

“When we ingest more robust information, our reporting gets to be more robust” and that leads to better insights and proactive decision-making by leadership, said Alexander Hall, trust and safety architect at AI-powered fraud platform Sift.  

Rich, multidimensional data 

There is a fundamental evolution under way affecting how companies approach fraud mitigation, said Hall. AI and machine learning play a key role, but equally important is the ability to leverage richer data sets — from within and beyond an organization, across platforms, networks, and even “inferred” data to make predictions — all while leveraging human capacity to detect and interpret nuances in ways that machines just can’t. 

Gone are the days of using rigid rules to prioritize case investigation, triangulating 10-15 signals, and spending weeks to review, escalate, and respond to suspected fraud, said Philip Say, vice president, solutions and product management, TTEC. 

“Now, one individual can process 20,000 signals almost instantaneously, triangulated against many factors, to produce a real-time rule score that’s transparent to upper levels of management,” he said. “It’s just night and day. We’ve gone lightspeed ahead with these types of capabilities.” 

Context key for the right outcomes 

The crux of the challenge, Say added, is balance: How to introduce fraud techniques without adding friction that harms the experience and alienates customers. It’s here that context comes into play. 

“Humans are really great at determining context over machines. We have a great ability to identify anomalies,” he explained. “Machine learning can repeat the recognition of those anomalies but they are not really good at understanding context.” 

For example, a human can understand that some high-value customers travel across the globe with great frequency and their patterns of transactions, while analogous, are if fact, legitimate, whereas an algorithm might generate false positives that flag these same transactions as suspected fraud. 

“Good leaders, good managers can understand and can coach their teams to recognize these nuances,” Say said. “All these AI and ML tools can help our productivity, but we need to balance that with operational discipline and experience.” 

Hall agreed: “There’s always going to be a human element to fraud prevention, no matter how much automation there is, no matter how much technology we’re leveraging.” 

Say added that some executives view fraud management as a “set it and forget it” proposition, when in fact, the opposite is true: “The good news is you can get a lot of leverage from a very small team — but that team has to be empowered to do the right things. 

“It’s no longer task-oriented style of work but more high-level decisioning, pattern recognition, interpretation, and anticipating where the business is growing and evolving. The good news is the industry has caught up, but the organizational models have to catch up, as well.” 

Validate, verify, identify 

Whenever rolling out something new — a digital form for customers to complete, a new buy-now-pay-later payment option, or a new app — anticipate that fraudsters will discover and target these customer-facing touchpoints. 

Hall said it’s essential to validate newly created accounts, but that’s not enough. It’s crucial to go further, to verify that account creators are whom they claim to be. This is where device intelligence uses geolocation to flag suspicious activity, synthetic credentials, and bots used in account takeovers (ATOs). 

Next: Identify, he said. 

Companies need to analyze how users interact with their platforms to identify and understand what constitutes behavior of legitimate customers versus fraudulent behavior. This third step to identify good and bad behavior is what enables leaders to make informed decisions about workflows for handling activity that sends up a yellow, orange, or red flag. 

“There’s a saying in fraud prevention that goes, ‘If you haven’t seen it, you haven’t seen it…yet,’ ” Hall said. “If a particular platform hasn’t seen it yet, the platform up the street has.” That’s the value of expanding data analysis beyond just transactions and accounts. 

“We’re seeing social engineering of the consumer, of the platform, and employees of the platform pick up,” he said. 

“We’re seeing all these very different, very expansive fraud methods taking off across the network. By plugging into cross-platform, data-sharing networks, we’re going to be able to proactively see [a threat] before it hits our platform. There’s tremendous value in sharing data across platforms.” 

For more color and commentary from Hall and Say, watch the full event on-demand, “Securing trust: Tackling digital payment fraud while elevating CX.”  

Of the 5 CX trends highlighted by TTEC in its CX trends report, the emergence of autonomous AI agents signals what could be the biggest innovation in the customer experience space in the next year.

“This is the year of generative. Next year is the year of agents,” said Jeremy Schowalter of Salesforce.com at a recent event centered around the technology. He echoed predictions from Gartner, Forrester, Everest, and other researchers banking on “agentic AI” as a significant milestone in the AI evolution. 

Agentic AI is designed to conduct more complex actions than machine learning or generative AI, with minimal human supervision. Given the right data, it knows your business, plans and reasons, takes action, and scales for deep personalization. Gartner predicts that by 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, compared to less than 1% in 2024, enabling 15% of day-to-day work decisions to be made autonomously.

Early adoption is found most in sales and marketing, customer support, and HR functions, according to Everest Group. Many tech companies are vying for dominance in developing AI agent platforms. Not surprisingly, hyperscalers like Google and Microsoft have taken an early lead, but the field is growing rapidly (see Everest’s map and analysis). 

Say hi to Sophie from Saks

What exactly do AI agents do? Let’s review examples from the recent Salesforce conference I attended:

In luxury retail, AI agents can recognize photos, understand text, and make customer recommendations that are personal and authentic, said Saks Global CEO Marc Metrick in a video shared at the conference. AI agents can share their insight with human contact center associates or directly with the customer. “Humans with agents drive customer success together,” he added in the video.

Patrick Stokes, executive vice president of product and industries marketing at Salesforce, put the concept to the test with a demo of Saks’ AI assistant Sophie. Through a natural phone conversation, Sophie identified Stokes as the caller, knew he had just purchased a shirt, and listened to his request to exchange it. She recommended a larger size and offered to make the exchange with a specific delivery window to his address. When he declined because of the shipping time, she identified his calling location and suggested a local store to pick up the new item within three hours. He accepted and completed the interaction, all in under one minute.

Of course this was a pre-planned demo, but it illustrated the aspiration of CX leaders to use AI to further simplify interactions and integrate data to solve customer challenges more easily. 

Banking bets on AI agents

The technology has implications across nearly all industries. Olivia Boles, assistant vice president of solution architecture at Pentagon Federal (PenFed) Credit Union, presented that she’s working with Salesforce AI agents to nurture marketing launches, provide customer support assistance, and create sales plans. It also helps maintain compliance and prepare for regulatory changes. 

“Breathtaking” is how she described the AI technology. “It’s a strange word to use about tech, but that’s where we’re at,” she said.

In the tech world, Vivint home security already had award-winning customer support and wanted to see what’s next, said Eddie Prignano, CRM platform director. The company created pilots for some of its most complex product troubleshooting service tasks. 

“As a customer, I don’t want to wait on the phone for 20 minutes when an Agentforce agent can do it right away,” he explained of why the company launched its AI agent program. Now, the AI agents connect to Vivint’s Internet of Things (IoT) device data to identify product issues. For example, if a customer calls to say their security camera isn’t working, it can determine which device has an error and refresh it. 

The interaction happens in seconds or minutes, rather than a typical human interaction where the associate waits for the customer to find and reboot the device, Prignano said. “We can spend most of our time delivering business value to customers.”

AI agents need data clarity to succeed

For AI agents to reach their potential, they need to connect to multiple data systems. The bots are programmed to move beyond large language models (LLMs) to connect to internal systems including CRM, ERP, inventory, point-of-sale, and others to find information and complete actions using retrieval augmented generation (RAG). In many companies, these systems are “islands of disconnected data,” according to Sanjna Parulekar, Salesforce vice president of product marketing. Some data may not be even digitized, and security issues remain top of mind.

Data accuracy, availability, and secure integration lead to more powerful AI agents completing more complex tasks for your business. Yet many companies still struggle with data — a recent AI survey from S&P Global Market Intelligence and Weka found that the biggest AI infrastructure challenge is data storage and management, well ahead of computing, security, and network challenges. That’s why many experts recommend working with partners to deploy and maintain AI agents, rather than building them from scratch. 

What will AI agents look like in 2025?

2025 looks to be another banner year for AI. Will AI agents fulfill their promise to significantly improve the customer experience? Are we truly in another wave of AI evolution, after predictive and generative?

That’s the goal, said Salesforce CTO Parker Harris at the conference. “We all want to get to the world of AI customer success.”