Intrepid Travel shifts gears on digital transformation

Intrepid Travel consolidated its databases and customer service operations into Salesforce to make its travel advice and marketing to customers more streamlined, automated and targeted.

Intrepid chief customer officer Leigh Barnes told iTnews that by centralising 10 disparate databases across 30 countries into a mix of Salesforce' service, marketing  and experience clouds, the tour operator had been able to create a single view of the customer, which they could use to personalise service.

This, he said, had contributed to a high net promoter score (NPS) rating by customers.

Barnes said that travel planning was complicated, but that Intrepid aimed to simplify the process with personalised prompts, on topics such as visas, currency or what to pack.

“Through the marketing cloud we can email customers, more responsive, more personalised information," he said.

“We can give you a welcome email [once you've booked a trip]. We can follow up and give you details around what you need to pack or what to expect.” 

Barnes said Intrepid was using integrated customer data to send automated, targeted emails for both travel advice and marketing.

Previously, it did not have a single view of the customer across its operations, and was only able to send blast email campaigns.

Barnes said automated but personalised sends drove revenue for the operator. He said the open and clickthrough rates on the emails were "respectively double and triple that of standard email sends".

Single view

Barnes said that Intrepid’s travel consultants use Salesforce service cloud’s intelligent agent console to respond to inquiries from travellers and prospects.

The platform fetches and displays all the customer’s information in one place, from travel plans to previous inquiries.

Barnes said that previously travel consultants had to dip into multiple "disparate" systems to retrieve information, whereas now they were immediately presented with useful context.

Barnes added that Salesforce’s AI software Einstein, which recommends information that could be relevant to a customer’s inquiry, had also helped speed up customer response times. 

“You'll also get Einstein on the side, pulling through information that the customer might need," Barnes said.

"We could have a blog about what to pack for Morocco. The agent can then send that to the [travelling] customer, and they'd be able to then engage with the customer through that particular platform.”

Through Salesforce service cloud, customers could also elect to engage via live chat or phone call, according to their individual preferences.

Business management

Barnes said that the technology upgrades had enabled a 360 degree view of productivity across Intrepid Travel's different divisions.

“With one click we can see performance," he said.

"We can see how our service levels are going. We can get a better understanding of our productivity across our global sales teams as well.”

Barnes said that for the first 27 years of the 33-year-old Australian business, it had no specific customer relationship management (CRM) system.

“There were tools that acted like a CRM, but they weren't CRMs," he said.

"There were places to store information: databases. We had our own bespoke software called Starship but that was more about our product.

"It did do some of that customer stuff, so we did have things acting and pretending like CRMs but they weren't."

“Salesforce was the first system that we got into the company to make shortcuts. But in the meantime, it had been Excel spreadsheets, like all that sort of stuff.”

Not all in-house systems had been transitioned to Salesforce; Barnes noted some travel-specific systems were kept separate, and interacted with Salesforce via APIs.

Digital approach

At the end of last year, Intrepid appointed long-time employee Anu Karunatilaka to a newly created chief technology officer role, leading the company's digital transformation.

The digital transformation strategy aims to help Intrepid’s goal of hitting $1 billion revenue by the 2025-26 financial year.

The next phase in the technology roadmap is a 'headless' CMS, Barnes said.

“It's like a CMS but what it enables you to do is you store your content once, and then it can be presented to customers in a number of different platforms," he explained.

“It can be used for voice, so the content that's on that platform, when you want to use Alexa —hey, Alexa, tell me Intrepid’s travel itinerary for Morocco— it would do that if there was to be an app. It would pull the information from the same place.

“We're trying to modernise to say, here's our web, our CMS, we [have] all of our information on our content management system, and then it goes out to different customer facing tools."