Byond Travel improves customer experience by 10X with Freshsales

Byond Travel is different from other travel agencies, says Aashray Patel from Partnerships and Marketing. The idea behind Byond Travel is to provide a transformative experience for each of their travelers, not just a holiday. It’s a community of like-minded travelers who love new adventures and seek different experiences. The hospitality business creates itineraries for groups ranging from women-only travellers to mom & kids. They also carry out bespoken itineraries for yoga lovers, wine enthusiasts, bikers and more.

Founded in 2015 by Vikram Ahuja, Byond Travel empowers people to experience culture, connect with co-travellers, and create a meaningful journey out of a holiday. Since adopting Freshsales, Byond Travel has improved customer experience by 10X, achieved 20/20 sales visibility and attained 20X faster analysis.

Did Byond Travel need a CRM?

Short answer—yes.

To quote Aashray:

“Being an online business it’s important for us to attract customers. As a lean and small sales team, we have a need to effectively collaborate with each other. And right off the bat, we knew we would rely on a CRM system. We didn’t just want a central place to store our information; we also wanted to manage our workload effectively and improve ease of doing business.”

Aashray Patel
 Partnerships and Marketing 

 

This group of millennial thinkers had begun business with a CRM system. And like most businesses, they found their first CRM Agile through Google search

Agile CRM—not so agile

Travel industry is a fast growing sector, and a very seasonal industry. So, capitalizing on this trend is necessary for a travel company to improve business and stay ahead of competition.

One of the benefits of implementing a CRM for hospitality is to increase customer satisfaction. This occurs through faster service, personalized response and maintaining customer history. But if the CRM doesn’t fully meet your business needs then you may not be able to use your data at your disposal. This is what happened with Byond Travel after using Agile CRM for a couple of months.

“Agile didn’t have a great support team. They were slow to respond to our queries which in turn slowed us down. We needed more functionality with email, storage and reporting. Overall, it didn’t allow us to manage our customers better nor empower our sales team. This prompted us to to shift away from Agile.”

Choosing Freshsales CRM for hospitality

After the experience with their initial CRM, Byond Travel had to go through a second round of CRM search.

But this time, they had a surefire way to find the right CRM. They reviewed several systems, compared pricing plans, and tried and tested features. Then, they discovered Freshsales.

“Freshsales is aptly named—a fresh and clean interface. It’s a simple and easy-to-use CRM that stands out from the rest in both functionality and adoptability. As a small team with limited budget, Freshsales competitive pricing plans helped us choose the right one for our business.”

Using Freshsales to manage inbound leads and bookings

Byond travel relies on inbound marketing for lead generation. They attract visitors through social media ads, photography, blog posts, etc. Sometimes through their own guests’ experience. These activities bring new visitors to their site who sign up to be a part of the community or inquire about upcoming trips. Capturing form data and capitalizing on inbound leads when they’re warm is important for Byond Travel to increase conversions.

There are a flurry of different people with different interests visiting their website. So, they categorize leads based on their preferred travel dates into three buckets— on the exact date, in the next 3-6 months, and unsure. These details are captured in the booking form.

Let’s say a visitor wants to go on an Argentinian Adventure. When submitting the form, they’ll also provide their preferred travel dates. This helps sales reps understand guest preference to focus on opportunities and have meaningful conversations.

Freshsales’ Smartforms feature captures sign-up form information and auto-creates the booking as a deal and creates the associated contact.

Prioritizing opportunities using Multiple Sales Pipelines

Every business has their way of tracking information. So it’s important that you can customize the CRM to meet your needs. That’s just what Byond Travel did with Freshsales.

At Byond Travel, sales processes are sometimes not straightforward. Even with one sales team their opportunities are handled differently. Depending on visitor’s preferred travel dates, a deal on creation must enter into one of three different pipelines.

“We’re able to easily categorize incoming bookings into different pipelines without any manual work. Freshsales allows us to be more efficient by being able to access pipelines in just two clicks. With multiple sales pipelines we can track different travel preferences in unique pipelines, and better plan our sales efforts.”

Once a deal is created and added to the respective pipeline, it is assigned to a sales rep who follows the sales process sequence for that pipeline. The team has achieved 20/20 visibility into sales pipelines for every sales process.

Getting it together with Freshsales

Communications: Like any travel agency, Byond Travel agents need to keep track of booking deals through proper follow-ups. It is crucial for agents to respond quickly and have a contact’s related conversations within the CRM. So, agents integrated their email account with their Freshsales profile to send and receive emails from the CRM itself.

Reminders: Notes is a nifty feature in Freshsales for Byond Travel agents to quickly jot down information during phone calls. “Having it in the CRM is easy for the team to view instead of sticky notes or random pieces of paper, and it’s good CRM practice too”, said Aashray. And, if agents need a reminder to follow-up on a certain day or email a travel quote, then they set up a task.

Email automations: Workflow automation in the CRM has allowed Byond Travel to streamline multiple marketing tasks. For example, the team has set up email automation based on deal stages. If a guest books a purchase and deal stage is updated to won, then a workflow automation sends a thank you email to the guest. Similarly, when a deal doesn’t come through, a follow-up email is sent. They’ve also integrated Freshsales with MailChimp for email marketing.

Sales reports: “The Reports Dashboard is our favorite feature in Freshsales”, shared Aashray. “It helps us analyze sales performance and keeps us on our toes. From lack of reporting in our previous tool, we now generate reports 20X faster.” The team runs reports on campaign performance, deals lost by reason, phone calls, agent performance, and several more. Being able to quickly see how campaigns or agents are doing from different perspectives on a dashboard enables Byond Travel to make data-driven decisions and grow sales.

The team at Byond Travel drives actionable insights using the data inside Freshsales. Having a full 360-degree view of a customer’s profile through conversations and historical bookings helps understand customer behavior and learn their needs. The sales team used this information to deliver 10X better customer experience and win their loyalty.

What lies beyond?

For Byond Travel, the next focus is to implement Freshdesk customer support tool to integrate with Freshsales.

“Currently, we respond to guest inquiries from our support email, and sometimes as comments on our Facebook posts or DMs. It takes at least one dedicated person’s time and effort to keep a tab on incoming queries. Our goal is to be able to measure requests and quantify our efforts. In order for us to properly do this, all of our data needs to be in place. And, we’re exploring Freshdesk to connect our pieces.”

As for Freshsales:

“We love it! For a small business like ours, the functionalities has really benefited the sales team in tracking their activities and deals. Freshsales is continually coming up with new features and updates. Every now and then we’re exploring new ways to better achieve our tasks. We’re glad to work with a company like Freshworks.”

 

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