How Royal Resorts Enhances Customer Experience

2020 may have stunted some growth in the global hotel and timeshare markets, but experts still expect an industry increase of 2% to 9.45% respectively by 2023. To keep up with the surge in demand and competition, Royal Resorts has spent the last several years innovating and evolving to better serve its customers and staff.

Here’s how Corporate Special Projects Manager Federico Beyer and his team have been transforming customer experience and employee engagement with Salesforce and AppExchange apps.

Shifting Away from Outdated, Manual Processes
Established in 1975, Royal Resorts has a long history of providing secluded, luxury amenities to those looking for memorable vacations. But by 2018, while many aspects of their resort experience had been updated, the company’s concierges were still using pen and paper to manage customer interactions and information.

On top of those manual processes to record valuable business insights, concierges also had to individually email every customer for every touchpoint of their stay — when they booked, before they arrived, after they returned home, and any questions they may have had along the way.
With new hotel customers and timeshare members being added every day, Royal Resorts knew it needed a single source of truth to digitally manage, automate, and keep track of customer and corporate data and activities. Federico found Salesforce and immediately implemented Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, and several AppExchange apps to help them make the digital switch.

Enhancing the Customer and Employee Experience Through Automation
Unless they have been to the resort before, one of the first touchpoints a customer has with a hotel or timeshare company is email marketing. With Marketing Cloud Journey Builder, every customer has its own personalized “welcome pre-arrival journey,” and the emails are completely automated, so the concierge has more time to devote to other customer management activities.

In the past, when customers arrived on site, the concierge would meet them with whatever information they had on a clipboard. This often caused inconsistencies in data and also left room for data protection issues. Today, now that all of the data is now in one digital location, concierges can access customer information via a mobile app. This has not only led to a smoother customer experience, and data protection and privacy, but also gives concierges the ability to make updates and enter data in the field, away from the computer.

Together, these improvements have led to a 4 percentage point increase in sales penetration rates and two hours saved per day, per concierge for customer management.



Improving Employee Engagement and Resort Performance With Ongoing Education
“During COVID-19, we closed all of the properties for about six weeks,” says Federico. “Because of Trail Tracker, we were able to maximize this time by performing reports on overall property and employee performance. Once we identified which areas needed strengthening, we could assign trails to help employees solve real business challenges.”

AppExchange app Trail Tracker not only allows them to automatically assign new users to a specific Trailhead module, but also helps them facilitate ongoing training and user adoption.

Keeping Data Safe, Secure & Updated
In addition to Trail Tracker and Lightning Universal Lookup Component, two other apps Royal Resorts has relied on are OwnBackup and Elements.cloud.

During the Salesforce Winter ’21 Release, these two apps helped Royal Resorts restore broken Apex Classes in a matter of hours. In the past, this would have taken the company days to figure out, but with the help of OwnBackup’s recovery features, the team was able to solve the problem in no time.

“As we look to the future, we know we would not have been able to meet the goals we have without Salesforce and the AppExchange,” says Federico. “But now, we know they are within reach. And we can keep track of all that we’re doing along the way because of these solutions.”

Check out OwnBackup and Trail Tracker on AppExchange, and for more apps that help the travel and hospitality industry, visit our apps collections page.

This article originally appeared on AppExchange and Salesforce Ecosystem.