Just You and Travelsphere, the escorted and single traveller specialist tour operators owned by G Touring – the touring division of G Adventures’ founder Bruce Poon Tip’s business interests – have been using d-flo’s TravelComms platform since G Touring’s inception.

With an unplanned window of opportunity, d-flo worked with the two brands to both improve the information shared with their customers during the post-booking communications journey and further differentiate their customer experience.

Challenges

TravelComms was originally implemented to streamline the costly paper-based and manual processes relating to customer documentation. Integrated with Inspiretec’s Travelink reservation system, the automation delivered by the multi-channel communications journey achieved a 70% digital adoption rate and a full return-on-investment (ROI) within the forecasted 12 months.

Since then, the unexpected time afforded by the impact of COVID-19 on usual business operations has enabled Just You and Travelsphere to undertake a review with d-flo of their customer communications journey, the overall customer experience, and explore new opportunities to improve both.

d-flo has been a key strategic partner, helping us to review and map our customer journey and implement the right communications to customers at the right time. They worked with us to develop a series of communications that were aligned to our brand guidelines to ensure a consistent look and feel throughout the customer's journey with us. The team at d-flo have been an absolute pleasure to work with and we look forward to continuing to develop our customer journeys with them in the future.

Solution

By collaborating with d-flo, Just You and Travelsphere have implemented a new immersive and agile communications journey. This includes additional capabilities to help safeguard customer health and data, and capture customer sentiment and feedback.

New designs for both HTML emails and PDF documents were produced by d-flo to better align communications for the two brands. A custom API was provided by d-flo to incorporate rich digital content automatically aggregated from their Umbraco CMS. And granular business rules added to the communication process to promote targeted excursions relevant to each customer and their tour at the various stages of the communications journey.

Non-dynamic content and communication scheduling have been soft-coded within the TravelComms portal to enable the marketing team to manage changes to both. Whether driven by internal requirements or customer feedback from the new ‘in-journey sentiment’ functionality, this now provides the ability for business stakeholders to manage the content, tone of voice, and timing of each communication to continually improve the customer experience.

Three additional d-flo modules were also adopted as part of this TravelComms project:

  • The TravelComms Document Portal has been integrated with both brands’ ‘My Account’ portals to provide a branded e-presentment capability. Replacing the PDF attachments in emails with links to the relevant portal enables secure self-service to safeguard the personal identifiable information (PII) contained within the customer documentation.
  • The TravelComms Broadcast Comms module has been configured with each brands’ HTML email templates. This enables the operations team to send ad hoc communications coherent with the automated journey. Driven by the booking data from Travelink, each message can be uniquely personalised and relevant to its recipient.
  • The TravelComms COVID-Secure solution has been incorporated within the communications journey to capture customer health information at the critical pre-departure stage. With inbuilt automation for reminders, escalation, and storing, the solution helps to keep customers safe, and in turn helps to protect the company’s reputation.

Every customer communication – along with how and when they were sent – can be viewed directly from within Salesforce. Using another d-flo custom API, the associated Salesforce account and booking records are automatically updated to provide the contact centre a 360-degree customer view from their core system.

Combining all of this in an automated and immersive communications journey driven by customer data and managed in a single platform has provided a rich customer experience that can be continually optimised, whilst minimising the burden on the IT department.

d-flo's TravelComms solution has allowed us to gain more control over the content and timings of the communications and they have worked with us to come up with new and innovative ideas to help keep our customers informed and feel safer whilst travelling. They have been hugely supportive over what has been a difficult time for the travel industry and gone above and beyond in order to solve technical challenges and minimise the impact on IT.

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