Smart Front End Basic

Bring the benefits of an intuitive, easy-to-use interface to your reservations agents

Even as traveller numbers keep growing, airlines face continuous pressure to increase operational efficiency, improve customer service and drive down costs.

Smart Front End Basic helps you meet all these objectives – and it can be up and running in just days.

Smart Front End Basic is an intelligent, user-friendly interface providing access to SITA’s extensive portfolio of passenger- and travel-related mainframe products.

It can be delivered with any enhancements you request and integrated with your own systems.

Overview

Smart Front End Basic is used in airline reservations centres, outsourced call centres, city travel offices and airport ticket desks.

It is a personal computer-based Windows product. It provides standard multi-tasking capabilities while allowing simultaneous use of other personal computer (PC) applications (e.g., word processing, spreadsheets, and internal accounting packages).

Smart Front End Basic will benefit you if:

You need more flexible agents to support expansion plans or deal with seasonal variations
You plan to outsource part or all of your core call centre operations
You have remote stations staffed on an occasional basis
You would like your agents to be more sales and customer-service focused
You would like to integrate other systems into a single point-of-sale tool

Benefits

Smart Front End Basic provides the following benefits.

Reduced training costs

Consistent user interface reduces training times from weeks to days.

Increased agent flexibility

Rapidly deployed to any location
Outsource call centres
Optimize home workers
Outsource reservations directly to business customers

Improved customer service

Simple interface makes reservations easy for occasional users
Familiar command-line interface for expert users – with new graphical features
Integrates with customer systems, including frequent flyer databases, local payment gateways, local fares databases
Airline agents can access all relevant data in a single application

Improved customer loyalty

Agents have more time to concentrate on customer needs.

Increased call centre revenues

Train agents to be sales-focused rather than dealing with legacy systems
Engage customers and determine if they're receptive to higher revenue fares

Features

Smart Front End Basic includes the following features.

Pull-down menus for effortless access to information and reservations
Fill-in-the-blank forms for data entry, multiple data integration and manipulation options
Keyboard mapping capabilities
Screen-capture facilities
Easy access to multiple applications
Comprehensive context-sensitive help facilities
Quick and simple implementation
Open systems architecture

Smart Front End Basic interface includes the ability to:

View and sell air availability
Create and amend passenger name records (PNRs)
Edit itineraries
Retrieve PNR and passenger lists
Use the interface in terminal emulator mode
Access fare and pricing information
Issue tickets (paper and e-tickets)

User interface

The system can be accessed via various high-level graphical user interfaces (GUI) or through expert (native) mode terminal emulation.

The GUIs allow the user to easily determine what needs to be processed in the required order. For example, the check-in procedure occurs in a predictable sequence. As each step is completed, the programme determines when that step is finished, and presents the next step automatically, without the agent having to know the mainframe entry. This removes much of the memorization of the host formats, reducing the training time normally needed for agents.