Trip A Deal is a deals website delivering limited time offers on travel adventures, at hard to beat prices. Founder Norm Black personally seeks out new experiences for listing online, ranging from laid back to extreme – including the downright bizarre (reindeer riding in Mongolia anyone?)

He's clear about his reasons for starting an Internet business; i.e. the love of adventure, not of IT. Building it on salesforce.com's cloud platform Heroku made perfect sense, providing an easy interface for updating daily deals without requiring a degree in technology.

Salesforce partner Systems Partners designed and deployed Trip A Deal's Heroku-based cloud platform application in under five weeks, delivering critical advantages to the startup business including system stability and cost effective scalability. As Heroku allows you to only pay for the resources you use, Black's plans to extend to new global markets are now dictated by the success of the business, not by infrastructure.

Equally, when Trip A Deal runs advertising campaigns in major newspapers around offers, Heroku provides the ability to scale up seamlessly to meet the extra demand and scale back afterwards.

With growth comes data. Inevitably, Trip A Deal has navigated a point where rapid growth might have threatened customer service if proper processes were not in place. Encouraged by the success of Salesforce Platform, Trip A Deal chose to do this by transitioning its customer enquiry management function into the cloud, on Salesforce Desk.com. Desk.com gives Trip A Deal the ability to track customer enquiries in workflow to a fast resolution every time.

Black contributes his success to a new ability to turn around bookings in two versus 24 hours, well within the decision-making sweet spot for customers considering an adventure. "When you're booking a unique experience you want solid contact, not 'I'll get back to you'."

Now with the global team collaborating across time zones there’s always an agent available to pick up a conversation. The ability to aggregate multiple channels of customer contact into a single queue ensures each enquiry - phone, email, or tweet - receives a timely response.