Anantara Vacation Club improves its customer service experience with Salesforce

After building an impressive customer base of more than 14,000 Club Points Owners in less than a decade, Anantara Vacation Club turned to Salesforce to help provide consistent customer experiences worthy of the luxury brand.

Life is a journey at Anantara Vacation Club. The vacation ownership programme was created in 2010 with a single property in Phuket. Now, it spans nine luxury Club-owned resorts across Southeast Asia and New Zealand.

The Club is popular among Chinese travellers with around 40 per cent of Club Points Owners from China. The remaining 60 per cent are spread throughout Southeast Asia, including significant presences in Thailand, Singapore and Hong Kong.

Club Points Owners purchase Club Points to pay for accommodation and resort services, and to access certain privileges and benefits. As the total number of Club Points required for stays at Club-owned resorts will never increase, Owners are essentially protected from inflation. This pay-now-holiday-later model enables Club Points Owners to holiday in the future at today’s prices.

“A stay at a Club Resort using Club Points will cost the same number of Club Points in 20 years’ time as it will today” explains Matthijs de Man, Director of Club Services and Innovation and Anantara Vacation Club. “That means you can secure the cost of your future holiday stays at today’s price.”

This model has proved incredibly popular among luxury holidaymakers in Southeast Asia, and the Club has built an impressive customer base of more than 14,000 Owners in less than a decade.

“Some of those Owners have been with us from the beginning,” says de Man. “We’ve seen many of them once or twice a year for the last nine years, so we get to know them very well. They really become part of the Anantara Vacation Club family.”

This growth has not always been easy to manage. Prior to Salesforce, customer service agents dealt with enquiries through email, which was inefficient and time consuming.

This method may have been acceptable in the Club’s early years, but as the Ownership base grew rapidly, enquiries became disjoined, difficult to track and more laborious to follow up.

“When we had 500 to 1,000 Club Points Owners, we could still manage the process manually,” says de Man. “But when you start getting 200 to 300 enquiries a day, it becomes unmanageable.”

That’s when de Man and his team turned to Service Cloud. The Club engaged local implementation partner Beryl8 for the deployment, and went live on Service Cloud in 2014.

Today, Service Cloud is used for end-to-end customer management – from the moment of booking to the end of the stay.

“We now officially offer customer service in four languages, so Service Cloud funnels all the enquiries into the right place. Our Club Points Owners don’t see any of this. They just send an enquiry and get a reply from the right person,” says de Man. “We have set it up so every single enquiry is handled efficiently and prioritised where needed. For a Club Points Owner, it is a seamless experience. As a result, we are able to scale our business and language offering based on market opportunities.”

WeChat integration through Charket has been a hit with the Club Points Owners in China, who can now log enquiries and communicate with customer service agents through the ever-popular social media platform. And integrated Live Chat case management through the Club’s website has opened another in-demand customer communication channel.

“Our entire customer service team has the same access to Club Points Owners’ information – whether they contact us through our call centre, WeChat, Live Chat or email,” de Man explains. “Club Points Owners now get a consistent experience through any channel they choose to use.”

Service Cloud had an almost immediate effect on the Club. The Club Points Owner base grew by an incredible 200 per cent following the deployment, and SLAs are down from around 10 hours to less than two hours.

Overall customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) never dip below 87 per cent and are as high as 94 per cent in the notoriously hard-marking Japanese market. Chinese Club Points Owners also rate the Club’s customer service highly with CSAT scores consistently around 90 per cent.

“The best thing about Service Cloud is that our employees now have a clear understanding of everyone they are talking to, and an essential view of all their previous interactions with us” says de Man.

But that’s not the end of the story for the Club’s digital transformation. The company is soon to deploy Sales Cloud for pre-sales lead management, and data analytics via a Tableau integration will be put to work to identify opportunities to up-sell existing Club Points Owners.

“With Service Cloud we know have a 180-degree customer view, but the Sales Cloud integration will give us a complete 360-degree view of our Club Points Owners,” says de Man. “We’re also currently using Email Studio on Marketing Cloud, but are planning to expand our usage once the Sales Cloud deployment is complete.”

The Anantara Vacation Club team also sees potential Financial Services Cloud and MuleSoft deployments on the horizon as the company works towards complete organisation-wide digital transformation.

“We are planning to revamp our website to drive more online transactions, and we’re constantly having conversations about new technologies such as chat bots and machine learning. We want to add even more service channels to create a real omni-channel experience,” said Winston Tsang, Group Director of Club Operations.

“But at the same time we’re conscious that digital transformation is most effective when it’s used to enhance – not eclipse – the human touch. We want to give our Club Points Owners very personalised experiences, but in a warm, human way. We consider them part of the Anantara Vacation Club family and we want them to feel this in every touch point they have with us,” shared Tsang.