Wyndham
“We now do all of our development on Salesforce which allows us to build apps up to 3x faster and makes them much easier to manage.”
Wyndham uses Salesforce to innovate fast and deliver meaningful customer experiences
Wyndham Destinations Asia Pacific is the largest timeshare development operation outside of North America. It is a division of Wyndham Destinations, the world’s largest vacation ownership and exchange company. Wyndham Destinations Asia Pacific markets and sells vacation ownership interests and provides consumer financing to vacation owners in Club Wyndham South Pacific. The Wyndham Destinations Asia Pacific team also provides support for affiliate Wyndham Destinations International Limited, responsible for the development of Club Wyndham Asia and Innovative Holiday Club by Club Wyndham.
With a wealth of hospitality expertise, Wyndham Destinations Asia Pacific is also a development partner of choice. Its management subsidiaries oversee a collection of approximately 75 hotels and resorts across the region, some of which are mixed-use developments where Wyndham Destinations holds an owning interest. Extending across Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, Hawaii, and Europe, the company’s managed portfolio includes resorts branded under the globally renowned Wyndham Grand, Wyndham, Wyndham Garden, Ramada by Wyndham, and Days Inn by Wyndham brands.
Operating in a relatively small industry, Wyndham’s portfolio of activities are fairly unique, as is the way it attracts and engages its customers. Consequently, there are not many out-of-the-box technologies suited to the company’s needs, so it relies heavily on custom development.
“Wyndham Destinations has always been an ambitious company and has led the industry with the introduction of innovations such as timeshare credits for access to multiple properties, superseding traditional systems of timeshare weeks owned in one property. Our drive to innovate and do things differently has meant we’ve had to build a lot of our own systems,” said Clive Hawkins, Senior IT Director for Wyndham Destinations Asia Pacific.
Salesforce has made this continuous innovation much easier by equipping Wyndham with a platform that enables the rapid development of new apps and experiences. These include apps, which empower employees to work more efficiently and personalise sales and support.
Unifying customer data
Wyndham first brought in Salesforce to replace a legacy database, which held information on leads and customers. The marketing team relied on the database to make outbound calls and invite leads to presentations where they could learn about the company’s offerings. However, the information in the database was often incomplete and there were many duplicated records, which led marketing to inadvertently contact the same person multiple times.
The IT team leveraged the Salesforce Platform to build a new database, which has since become a comprehensive people management system that includes not just contact information, but rich demographics and individual customer preferences. These customers include owners belonging to Wyndham’s vacation clubs as well as guests of the company’s managed hotels.
To migrate its data to the new system, the IT team used Salesforce Platform to build a deduplication process, which helped it avoid what could have been countless hours spent manually cleansing its data.
Supercharging developer productivity
After experiencing the ease and speed of developing on Salesforce Platform, there was no going back. The IT team made Salesforce its platform of choice for all future development projects. The decision has increased developer productivity by 50% and despite natural attrition reducing the size of the IT team, it is now able to handle a higher volume of projects.
“In the past, every new development seemed to take a lifetime, and we were spending too much time keeping systems up and running,” said Hawkins. “We now do all of our development on Salesforce which allows us to build apps up to 3x faster and makes them much easier to manage.”
Some of these time savings have come as a result of the security offered by Salesforce Platform. With Salesforce providing features to manage identity, privacy, and compliance, the IT team no longer needs to build these things from scratch for every app. They also have a common database available for the development of new apps and can save time by leveraging components like pre-built menus and navigational structure.
Many of the apps built by the team have created broader efficiencies for the company. One example is a scheduling app that helps optimise the number of leads attending sales presentations. The app is based on the wave scheduling approach where groups of people are booked to arrive at the same time.
The app has been built with added intelligence so it can dynamically determine how many people are likely to turn up based on things like time, day, and any offered incentives. Using these insights, Wyndham can optimise the number of people invited to each presentation and therefore increase potential sales.
Another app that’s boosted productivity is a pseudo preview dialler for the telesales team which makes outbound calls to timeshare owners to discuss potential upgrades. The pseudo preview dialler helps the team work through call lists more efficiently by stopping misdials and ensuring reps call every number in their queue. It also automatically surfaces owners’ profiles to enable a more personal conversation and provides management with detailed reporting on call volumes and timings.
Enhancing the customer experience
Wyndham is always innovating and has several projects in the pipeline, which will enhance the customer experience. One of these is a project to capture more insights on customers, which it can use to personalise every interaction, whether it’s over the phone or in one of Wyndham’s hotels.
Using survey data for example, Wyndham can learn more about its customers and their preferences so that it can make recommendations on which properties they may like to visit next.
“By using our data in Salesforce, we can be smarter about how we market and promote the right resorts to the right people. If we know that someone enjoys golfing for example, we can recommend the best destination for that activity,” said Hawkins.
Another project launched recently is an ecommerce site. Leveraging its purchasing power, Wyndham will use the site to provide customers with discounted rates on items like beds and even things like gym memberships. This would enable the company to provide more value to customers and therefore build brand loyalty.
Alongside all of these activities, Wyndham is using Tableau to help plan for the future. The analytics platform has replaced static spreadsheets to support financial planning and analysis, and allows users to drill down into their data for granular insights into financial results and trends like daily sales per rep.
Hawkins said that Tableau has also made it easier to share data, as compared to the past when data sharing involved circulating individual spreadsheets around the company. Now, business users can create their own dashboards and reports, creating overall efficiencies in reporting.
“Overall our data is much richer, but there’s definitely a bigger opportunity around how we use this data to support our innovation and growth,” said Hawkins.
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