Resortcom Leverages Rightnow® To Grow Its Business, Maximize Profitability, And Provide Exceptional Service To Its Clients’ Customers
Goals
- Provide exceptional client service to maximize business growth
- Fully understand and quickly respond to the needs of clients’ customers
- Effectively market additional services to optimize yield-per-customer
- Optimize efficiency of operations
Achievements
- Speed, simplicity, and accountability brought to diverse front- and back-office business processes
- Minimal headcount growth despite 30% annual growth
- Millions in incremental revenue from new services
- Ability to earn new business by demonstrating competitively superior technology capabilities to prospective clients
- 30% decrease in email volume, and 50% reduction in incident response times
To provide a great customer experience, you have to do more than just answer your phones quickly. You have to achieve operational excellence across your company—from the contact center to the back office—so that you can consistently respond to and anticipate your customers’ needs.
That’s exactly what ResortCom has done with the help of RightNow. In fact, by fully leveraging the accountability and automation RightNow can bring to virtually any internal or customer-facing business process, the company is meeting the needs of both its clients and its clients’ customers. As a result, its revenue has grown dramatically and its profitability is up 300 percent.
ResortCom provides a full range of services to companies that develop and own resort properties. These include specialized financial services—such as managing timeshare payments, servicing loans, and handling credit card transactions—as well as resort operations and customer care services. In addition, ResortCom empowers resort operators to generate substantial additional revenue from their customers through the sale of related services such as air travel and leisure activities.
By outsourcing these functions to ResortCom, resort operators gain multiple benefits. For one thing, they don’t have to implement the IT systems required to support these functions. For another, they can take advantage of ResortCom’s proven expertise in maximizing yield.
It’s a very complex business. Resort space is sold and packaged in many different ways. With a conventional timeshare, customers buy a week’s access to a specific property. Under more flexible programs, they purchase and accumulate “points” which can be applied to stays at multiple properties under the same ownership. Resort owners are looking to generate as much revenue as they can from their available room inventory, as well as from other value-added services. Customers, for their part, are looking for an enjoyable vacation experience that fits their particular timetable and preferences.
“To be successful, we have to deliver superior financial performance to our clients and superb vacation experiences to their customers,” explains Alex Marxer, ResortCom’s VP of financial services. “So we need to be very smart, very fast, and very efficient.”
High-Performance Customer Service Across All Communication Channels
ResortCom uses RightNow in a variety of ways to fulfill its complex business objectives. As the company’s global contact center solution, RightNow ensures that ResortCom provides excellent care for more than one million of its clients’ traveling customers. Regardless of how customers contact the company, ResortCom can quickly and effectively manage the issue from beginning to end. Even hard-copy documents and faxes sent to the company are converted to digital images and incorporated into the RightNow incident management system.
ResortCom extends this approach to its back-office functions as well. For example, if a customer calls about a credit card charge, the customer service representative who first handles the call can see if the appropriate person in the finance office has finished researching the issue. If not, the system automatically pushes out any necessary reminders and/or notifications.
This provides a variety of important business benefits. It ensures that no one “drops the ball” as incidents are handed from one group to another. It accelerates business processes, since everyone is individually accountable for when they received an incident, what they did with it, and when they moved it along toward resolution. And it reduces the amount of time people have to spend communicating with each other to check on the status of a particular issue. In fact, ResortCom’s internal email traffic has gone down by 30 percent since implementing the system—even as communication between the front and back office teams has substantially improved.
RightNow’s automated workflow has also helped ResortCom fulfill its goal of being almost completely paperless. Member contracts, correspondence, and other documents are scanned, so they can be filed and shared electronically. By attaching images of these documents to RightNow incidents, ResortCom is creating a digital workflow environment that enhances the speed and integrity of all of its internal business processes.
In addition, because it’s a hosted, web-based application, RightNow can be made immediately available to any authorized user anywhere in the world. This gives Marxer total flexibility in engaging outsourcers to handle peak seasonal workloads. Customer service representatives working in an outsourced contact center facility are plugged directly into ResortCom’s “digital nervous system”—so their activities can be tracked and managed just as if they were working at the company’s headquarters. They’re also provided with a comprehensive knowledge base covering policies and procedures for all of ResortCom’s clients. This ensures that customers get the same helpful service from ResortCom, whether they interact with a seasoned employee or a brand-new hire.
And RightNow’s analytics tools give Marxer visibility into individual agent performance—giving him the ability to offer incentives based on incident handling times. This has increased awareness around the need to quickly and accurately respond to member incidents, and has halved response times.
“With RightNow, we can instantly deliver accurate, up-to-date information wherever it’s needed across our company and beyond,” Marxer observes. “That makes us an extremely efficient and reliable business partner for the resort operators we serve.”
Powerful Marketing Tools Drive Big Revenue Gains
Because RightNow gives ResortCom end-to-end visibility into the issues it handles for its clients’ customers, it provides a whole new level of insight into those customers’ needs and behaviors. The company can then act on those insights with RightNow’s marketing tools, which make it easy to generate a variety of targeted campaigns and personalized emails driven by specific attributes or events—such as a special promotion or an upcoming vacation.
These promotions fulfill two important business objectives. First and foremost, they generate significant additional revenue for both ResortCom and its clients. Air travel alone added $1 million to the company’s billings in the first year, and more is added daily by selling customers everything from trip insurance to gift baskets to tee times.
Second, they enable ResortCom to position its clients as “one-stop shops” for a great vacation experience—rather than as mere property owners. This enhances their individual brands and promotes much more tightly engaged relationships with their customers.
RightNow facilitates these promotions by allowing ResortCom to quickly and easily design targeted, fully personalized mailings—which can include links that drive customers to the private label websites that ResortCom manages for its clients. RightNow enables ResortCom to test its promotions with small, representative sample groups before sending them out to their entire targeted list. It also ensures that ResortCom complies with accepted anti-spam best practices by incorporating a link in every mailing that allows customers to opt out of future communications.
RightNow is integrated with their Oracle data warehouse to generate mailing lists based on transactional history for ResortCom’s clients’ customers. Recipients for any specific mailing can be drawn from that list based on any combination of attributes—including planned travel dates, past travel dates, locations, and previous ancillary purchases.
“RightNow’s marketing functionality allows us to grow our clients’ businesses in significant and measurable ways,” says Marxer. “It has radically transformed the economics of marketing for us and for them.”
Winning New Clients With Demonstrable Competitive Advantages
Because ResortCom provides customers with a superlative experience as they plan and enjoy their vacations, those customers are remaining happy and loyal to ResortCom’s clients. ResortCom’s clients, in turn, are remaining happy and loyal to ResortCom, because the company is taking such good care of their customers and enabling them to continuously grow their revenue.
RightNow also helps ResortCom to keep its clients happy by providing them with robust reports about its activities on their behalf and the results of those activities. This visibility gives clients a high level of comfort as they deepen and expand their business relationship with ResortCom.
In fact, RightNow actually helps ResortCom win over new clients. “When we show property managers what we can do for them using RightNow, they’re amazed,” he says. “It is a tangible competitive differentiator that gives us substantial advantages over other companies trying to service the resort market.”
Marxer adds that RightNow’s strong culture of service complements the power of its technology. “RightNow has always been a highly responsive business partner,” he says. “That responsiveness is especially important to us, because we’re using RightNow in such a strategic way—and because we’re constantly pushing the envelope.”
ResortCom International Homepage
About ResortCom International
ResortCom International provides comprehensive services to the vacation ownership and resort industry, enabling property developers to maximize profitability, customer satisfaction, and overall business performance. Those services include financial management, onsite hotel operations and reservations, club and loyalty program management, and cross-sell/up-sell programs. The company is based in San Diego and has a dominant share of the Mexican resort market.
Greg Gianforte