Case Study

Backoffice safeguards

Security measures to protect customer data boost client confidence By Aditya Kelekar

Sitting at their desks, Quest2travel's employees have a goldmine of sensitive customer data that they can view. Phone numbers, e-mail, age, all that is otherwise privy to the corporate human resource department, is shared with Quest2travel by those companies that have an account with it. However, Quest2travel's access control policies make it impossible for any employee to peruse more data than is required to assist a customer. When Quest2travel pitches to a client, much of the case rests on the company's ability to convince the customer about the measures to keep the data secure.

No one knows the value of trust better than Abhay Rangnekar, CEO, Quest2travel. He founded the company in 2000 and since then has worked with a team of developers to build the portal and its supporting logic. The development team has ranged from its initial strength of ten to fifteen programmers to its current strength of around twenty five.

Access control measures are of different types. An employee cannot access the systems unless she swipes her card at the office entrance door and at her terminal. Once an employee is logged in, system logs track the time spent by the employee on a customer's database. These can be viewed in real time and also as system log reports. There are automatic triggers sent to the monitoring team in case an employees' usage of a particular database exceeds the warranted limits.

At Quest2travel's 200-seater contact center in Nasik, computers don't have ports for pen drives and employees aren't allowed access to generic sites (yahoo, google, etc).

Rangnekar said that while the security measures have helped build confidence, it's the customization that the company provides for its clients that has helped it gain customers. “We allow corporates to manage their employees' corporate travel, ensuring that employees plan their travel according to the company's official policy,” said Rangnekar.

Since the company's inception, Rangnekar and his team have been working to improve the company's processes and add new features to the portal. One of the features checks the ticket desired by a customer and compares it with options from competing airlines (at a departure time close to the one requested by the customer), suggesting a cheaper ticket if it is available.

Quest2travel's customer service desk monitors customer's transactions; incase an online transaction for purchasing a ticket fails, the particular employee who is assigned to the customer then follows up on the transaction to see that it is closed. Quest2travel's system generates SMS alerts to its employees to keep them updated on the travel transactions undertaken by the client.

aditya.kelekar@expressindia.com