Luxury Escapes
“Salesforce helps us understand what’s important to each customer in each country, and gives us the scalability we need to expand internationally.”
Luxury Escapes delivers personalisation at scale and speeds innovation with Salesforce
Luxury Escapes has established itself as the fastest growing online travel company in Australia by offering incredible deals on amazing holidays to the world’s best destinations. From city breaks and beach holidays to cruises and tours, the company offers something for every traveller and luxurious extras like spa treatments and all inclusive dining.
With the help of Salesforce, Luxury Escapes is bringing more innovation and personalisation to the customer experience. It’s also widening its offerings so that customers can use Luxury Escapes to book and manage their whole trip, including flights.
"We want to provide customers with a luxurious experience from end-to-end and that starts with knowing as much as possible about our customers. Salesforce helps us understand what’s important to each customer in each country, and gives us the scalability we need to expand internationally,” said Cameron Holland, CEO, Luxury Escapes.
Going all in on Salesforce
In its early days, innovation and functions like marketing were slowed down by Luxury Escape’s legacy processes and technologies. The company had emerged from the consolidation of different businesses and had data and processes running on multiple platforms. It wanted to bring everything together onto a single technology stack and made the decision to go all in on Salesforce.
“Rather than cobble together an array of systems, we wanted to optimise our business by putting everything on one platform. The scalability and process efficiency of Salesforce convinced us it was the way to go,” said Holland.
Powering innovation
Luxury Escapes is now using Salesforce to manage and grow its business, and innovate faster than ever. Heroku is a key enabler of its success and supports a streamlined development process where teams work in squads to quickly build and deploy new customer experiences. Each squad is fully empowered to deliver their own apps and has all the resources needed to do so, including a front- and back-end developer, product manager and user experience (UX) designer.
Heroku helps the squads develop and enhance apps incredibly fast, using clicks rather than code. It has also eliminated the need for DevOps so that squads can focus their time on improving the experience of customers, hotel and travel partners, and internal stakeholders like marketing.
Using Heroku and this squad-based approach, Luxury Escapes has developed a game-changing mobile experience. It is much more immersive than the company’s previous mobile site and serves up all the content and visuals customers need to choose their next escape. The booking process has also been made friction-free so customers can complete this right on the spot.
The new mobile experience has resulted in a 22% increase in mobile purchases and a 32% increase in the average order value of these purchases. It has also contributed to a 2.9% increase in conversion rates.
Blazing a new trail in engagement
One of the things that sets Luxury Escapes apart from other online travel providers is that its customers don’t always have an exact destination in mind; they are looking for great deals matching their interests as well as fresh inspiration. In order to automate legacy operational processes and focus on personalisation, Luxury Escapes has more recently adopted Marketing Cloud, including Einstein Recommendations. Together, these solutions capture valuable behavioural insights and deliver personalised content for every customer at the right time and on their preferred channel.
“We can now track customer behaviour in real-time to understand which deals and destinations they’re most interested in and use that feedback to refine communications going out that very same day,” said David Robuck, Head of Marketing Automation. “When you’re sending multiple communications throughout the day that generate revenue, it is important to have that immediate feedback loop and the ability to tweak content without disrupting scheduled activity.”
Driving strategy and growth
All of the capabilities provided by Salesforce have resulted in a 48% increase in referred traffic and a 25% uplift in revenue. The insights into customer preferences have been used to shape the company’s strategy and how it packages and promotes different deals. Luxury Escapes is also exploring the use of Salesforce Audience Studio to expand on these insights and leverage them to engage new customers. Other initiatives planned include optimising the use of Service Cloud in the call centre and adopting Einstein Next Best Action to guide sales and support conversations.
Luxury Escapes also wants to improve the efficiency of working with partners and suppliers by removing manual steps involved in processes like contract management.
"Salesforce has given us one platform that can basically do anything and by building a team of experts around that we can speed up the implementation of changes and new capabilities," said Holland. "It also supports our strategy of globalised localisation where we can create content and solutions in Australia and rapidly tailor them for different countries. This empowers us to expand without replicating the size of our Australian team over and over and ensures what we’re offering is relevant for each market."
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