Overview
A leading global ski resort operator faced a strike by its ski patrol that began in the last week of December and ran into mid-January. Ski patrol crews are essential to a resort’s operations, handling avalanche mitigation, terrain openings, and on-mountain safety response. Their absence changed how much of the mountain the resort could safely operate, directly affecting the guest experience. Service fell short of what guests had booked and paid for, and they called to say so.
The strike landed at the resort’s busiest point of the year, when many patrons had already planned to spend their holiday break on the mountain. Call volume climbed. The strike itself was no mystery, but the specific concerns behind those calls were. Leaders could not see which issues were driving contacts, in what proportion, or how quickly those issues were shifting.
Qualfon’s Quality Analytics and Insights team compressed an insight cycle that normally ran one to two weeks into a single day. That speed changed what the client could do with the findings. Rather than reviewing the disruption after it ended, leaders acted on customer concerns while conditions were still moving, and program performance improved across every measured metric through the quarter. Average handle time fell by 26 seconds, and customer satisfaction climbed from 4.40 to 4.53.
The Challenge
What Was Happening
Three things drove call volume at once: peak season, the strike, and a postal service disruption.
Peak season accounts for most of it. Holiday travel and school breaks make December and January the resort’s busiest stretch every year, with many patrons choosing to spend their holiday break at the resort. December brought 132,424 customer contacts, the highest month of the year. January followed with 119,732.
The strike then added customer contact volumes the season would never have produced on its own. Guests who arrived to resorts with reduced terrain and long lift lines called to cancel, to ask for refunds, or to find out what their passes still covered. Those conversations stacked on top of peak-season volume rather than replacing any of it, and they raised questions about pass value, terrain access, and rebooking that the operation had no historical pattern to work from. The strike ended in mid-January. The contacts it generated ran through the end of the month.
A postal service disruption created a third source of pressure, delaying pass and ticket deliveries to guests who had already paid and sending them to the contact center looking for alternatives.
Why the Delay in Insight Mattered
Understanding what customers needed depended on manual call listening and associate dispositions, a process that took one to two weeks to produce usable insight. That timeline is standard for manual QA programs. The first week goes to collecting and tracking data through call trackers, reports, and QA reviews to surface emerging trends. The second week goes to analysis, validation, and root cause identification. Survey results trailed the interaction by roughly seven days on top of that.
Nothing existed to absorb the surge in the meantime. Strike-related contacts flowed through standard frontline support channels, with no dedicated email queue, hotline, or escalation path to route them anywhere else. Associates fielded every inquiry alongside normal peak-season volume.
That lag carried real cost. Every day without clear contact drivers meant customers repeating themselves, escalations climbing, and service recovery aimed at problems that had already shifted.
Our Approach
Rather than sampling calls manually, Qualfon’s Quality Analytics and Insights team used AI Interaction Insights (Aii), a contact center speech analytics platform that sits within Qai Predict, one of the modules in our Qai Care suite of solutions. Aii reads and categorizes customer conversations at scale, identifying contact drivers, recurring themes, sentiment trends, resolution patterns, and emerging risks.
Working in Aii, the team searched for event-specific keywords tied to the disruption, then classified calls into categories based on what customers actually said. Aii generated call summaries and detected key events across every relevant interaction rather than the narrow sample manual review would have allowed.
The analysis covered 1,316 calls from the affected locations. Two disruption types accounted for 78% of them:
Ski patrol strike (53% of contacts): cancellations, refund requests, and complaints about long queue times.
Postal service disruption (25% of contacts): delivery delays, missing passes, ticket pickup requests, and cancellations.
The pattern underneath those numbers gave the client something a satisfaction score never would have. Operational disruption drove the volume, not dissatisfaction with the resort experience itself. Customers wanted certainty about the bookings they already held, or they wanted a clean way to limit the damage to their travel plans. Two different needs calling for two different responses.
Results
The client received actionable insight in one day instead of one to two weeks.
With contact drivers identified, leaders launched targeted communications that clarified available alternatives, ticket pickup options, refund policies, and rebooking paths. Those communications addressed questions real customers were actually asking rather than what the operation assumed they were asking.
The client also built the containment that had been missing. After the findings went to stakeholders, they established a dedicated email queue and support channels for strike-related inquiries, pulling that volume off the frontline associates who had been absorbing it alongside everything else.
Across a program supported by 189 associates in multiple locations, Q1 2025 performance improved against Q4 2024:
Average Handle Time: Fell from 425 seconds to 399 seconds.
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Rose from 4.40 to 4.53 on a five-point scale.
First Contact Resolution (FCR): Improved from 90% to 91%.
Knowledge Score: Increased from 4.50 to 4.59 on a five-point scale.
Quality: Held above 90% every month, across all lines of business.
Contact volume stayed nearly flat between the two quarters, 280,370 in Q4 and 277,567 in Q1. The program absorbed a strike during its highest-demand weeks and improved on every measured dimension without a lighter workload helping it along.
Beyond the Numbers
Contact drivers that would have surfaced after the disruption instead surfaced during it, early enough to shape how the client communicated while conditions were still moving. Technology did not resolve the strike or shorten a lift line. It gave the leaders managing the fallout a clear view of what customers needed, at a point when they could still act on it.
Timing beats completeness during a live event. A thorough analysis delivered after a disruption ends carries no operational value. Directional insight available on day one lets leaders adjust while the situation is still unfolding.
Contact drivers and satisfaction drivers answer different questions. Survey data eventually told the client how customers felt. Aii told them why customers called, which is the input an operation can actually act on.
There is a longer-term win inside the speed. Customers remember how a company treats them when something goes wrong, and issues resolved efficiently during a difficult moment build loyalty that smooth periods rarely create. Technology deployed in balance with the emotional intelligence of the associates using it produces satisfaction and loyalty that neither delivers alone.
About Qualfon
Qualfon is a global provider of omnichannel customer experience and business support solutions. From call center support to lead generation to ecommerce fulfillment, we support our clients and their customers throughout the customer journey.
Learn more about Qualfon’s Call Center Support, Customer Experience Solutions, and Back Office Support Services.
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