For a luxury vacation club that caters to high-end travelers, the relationship it has with its members must be as personal and intuitive as any vacation getaway is expected to be. When this client experienced substantial and rapid growth, it became clear that the old ways of handling the needs of members could not deliver the top-tier service that brought customers to the club. Personal vacation advisors collected valuable data about member preferences and travel history, but the company was still operating with a homegrown system of spreadsheets, emails, and piles of paperwork. We were brought in to implement a new customer relationship management (CRM) solution that would allow the entire company to grow the sort of personalized relationships that individual advisors were trying hard to maintain manually.

We designed and deployed a customized solution based on salesforce.com®’s Service Cloud® CRM that captures information on trips, trip proposals, and member preferences. The system laid the foundation for an end-to-end approach that combined strategy and design architecture with systems integration – reducing costs and increasing customer satisfaction across every channel. A detailed profile was created for each member that was not just accessible to personal vacation advisors, but also to destination concierge – delivered via cloud solution to PC, tablets, or other mobile devices. The club could now take a more active role in personalizing the experience of each trip. A customer experience optimizer now stores all member information, and a rules-based engine suggests relevant destinations for members that an advisor can use as a targeted travel recommendation. Any time that new information is discovered by an advisor or concierge (special needs, medical concerns, milestone dates), it can be added to the profile. We delivered an online Notification Center that alerts employees in real time about member activities, and about opportunities to proactively improve the customer experience.

The club doubled its membership through the acquisition of a competitor, and the system helped the club maintain a 96 percent member retention rate, and a Net Promoter Score™ of nearly 70 throughout the entire merger. The system is now being used by the club to identify new destinations to add to its portfolio, with investments now targeted for success through a better understanding of what its members desire.