At present, the tourism industry is burgeoning unlike ever before. People want to explore the world and experience unique cultures. This places the travel industry at the forefront of a positive change. While this has meant more sales the boom has come with its own set of challenges – the primary one being competition from online travel portals. It is imperative that your business keeps pace with evolving industry trends.
Combating this competition is not as difficult as it seems. Tour operators need to recognize their edge and play to their strengths. The transition from traditional marketing to online marketing is an underrated benefit. While travel portals spoil customers with choices, these choices can prove to be detrimental as well. Customers need to single-handedly arrange the entire trip which involves making multiple bookings. This is a frustrating and time-consuming process.
The frustration stemming from such a lengthy process is the reason customers prefer booking directly with tour operators. Personalized service and attention to detail is what customers expect from their travel operators. This personalization is impossible to experience when customers interact with the screen of a travel portal site. This mechanical process provides minimal clarity to the customer. Only you can provide customers with a friendly and personalized experience that most online portals lack.
But offering prompt service is difficult when multiple tasks demand your attention. A leading tour operator faced a similar problem before migrating to Paramantra’s platform. Our client provides pilgrimage packages to sacred temples across North India. The sales process included marketing on online portals and management of voluminous leads. Amidst all this, our client was battling issues with their existing lead management software. Not only was the software rigid but didn’t have any provisions for customizations and configurations. The team was also facing issues operating the software due to a complicated user interface. Thus, the overall implementation of the existing software was a failure.
Their Collaboration With Paramantra Helped Alleviate Many Concerns They Were Facing, Including:
- Quicker Sales From Landing Pages – Our customer’s main source of lead generation occurred through landing pages. With so many landing pages, they had no clear track of lead sources and it was difficult to track individual leads.
Paramantra’s Travel CRM enables seamless integration with all landing pages. The team is now able to track the source of leads and gain a deeper insight into which campaigns are generating positive results. - Yield Desired Results From Marketing Efforts – Like most tour operators, our client primarily uses Facebook to advertise their packages. Our client began facing issues because the existing software failed to map these leads to the system. The team also wasted precious time manually updating these leads and this led to a delay in engaging with customers. Considering the competition from the online market, this time-lapse led to the loss of prospects.
Migrating to our CRM facilitated Facebook integration, where our customer is now able to receive real-time alerts every time a lead is generated. This has transitioned into teams providing immediate service rather than wasting time on manually mapping leads from online channels. - Unearth The Potential Behind Each Conversation – Several customers tend to enquire using online chat feature and our client received multiple such inquiries in a given day. But what they lacked was a way to monitor these conversations and see if they had potential. With our auto-chat feature, our client can automatically map all chat inquiries to the CRM. All that the sales executives now have to do is contact the lead and take it forward. This helps our client understand the potential behind each conversation and how to best nurture these in order to realize bookings. Tour operators also undertake large marketing campaigns via sending bulk Email and bulk SMS. This is a pivotal form of marketing and one that helps generate leads. Hence, mapping leads received via this system is pivotal as missing on any lead can be detrimental.
- Manage Sales with Inbound/Outbound calls – Erratic call patterns and seasonal inquiries are almost a norm in the tourism business. Our customer received calls during odd hours of the day and this was causing a problem. This erratic pattern also minimized the extent of engagement each lead received. As a result, the client was losing out on incoming inquiries.
Paramantra’s embedded call tracking solution completely obliterated this problem. Our client is now able to establish consistent communication with customers. Not only do customers receive immediate service but the team no longer has to manually enter leads generated through calls. - Win Customers With The Best Pricing – When it comes to tour packages, different customers have different requirements that tour operators need to accommodate. This causes errors in documentation and this was a problem that caused a lot of distress to our client. With each new modification, our client had to update the existing quotation and resend it to customers. This made it difficult to keep track of changes made to the pricing and also increased human errors.
Our in-built quotation and invoicing feature omitted this problem. Our client now sends multiple quotations and keeps a track on pricing related changes. This also helps keep the customer engaged throughout the process and provides them with a package that fulfills their budget requirements.
The Result
Our client has streamlined existing processes that have improved the overall ROI, this has been achieved as a result of:
- Decrease in the time taken to respond to lead inquiries
- The first-time response rate has improved by 85%
- Amount of time spent on manual data entry has reduced by 90%
- Lost deals due to pricing are brought down by 82%
- The number of deals has increased as a result.
Paramantra’s intent is always to provide effective solutions that help customers improve their overall sales process. Our aim is to help each client receive the kind of results as those mentioned above. Our Travel CRM is designed to accommodate any numbers of configurations and customizations, so you can stay abreast of evolving industry trends.
