Kaptio flies high with Salesforce

Founded in 2012, the company launched Kaptio Travel, a next-generation reservation platform to help travel operators manage bookings from lead to quote to book, and to follow up with passengers post-trip.

It provides a 360-degree view of every passenger and booking tools help price and confirm personalised holidays without the complexity of juggling multiple stakeholders and systems. This not only accelerates productivity, but empowers staff with everything they need to have more relevant conversations with passengers and prospects.

Kaptio is responsible for setting up and onboarding customers to the platform, before handing over to leisure companies to customise, integrate, and extend the solution to meet their unique needs.

Each company has an assigned customer success manager to ensure they’re getting the most from the platform and to help them achieve their goals. While Kaptio Travel has always been built on Salesforce, it’s evolved over time with more new features to empower leisure companies to delight passengers the world over.

“Customers use Trailhead to learn how to use the Salesforce part of the platform, but many of them already use Salesforce in-house and can hit the ground running on a CRM system they already know well,” added Svansson.

The passenger journey starts with research, and Kaptio Travel integrates with customer websites to capture leads from forms. Customer sales teams can then proactively reach out to engage with prospects and build quotes, or decide to reach out later if they can see an open ticket or case waiting to be resolved.

Follow-up tasks are automatically added to the rep's diary to ensure no opportunity is missed, and reps have role-specific widgets to help them monitor targets and track commission, for example.

When passengers are ready to book, they simply click to confirm the booking, pay online via an integration, and the sales rep generates an itinerary – with up to 175,000 online proposals generated in 2021 alone, this saves a huge amount of time as well as eliminating paper.

“We provide omnichannel support using Salesforce Digital Engagement. Passenger queries are raised as cases and routed to the customer service team. Many use an integrated telephony system, like Vonage from the AppExchange, to give agents full visibility of the caller so they can have the best possible conversation without asking for the same information twice, and also making sure the customer data is up to date” said Svansson.

By capturing service data, travel brands can monitor outstanding actions and track common queries, which is valuable insight to help shape their service offerings and the content they share on their websites.

Kaptio Travel doesn’t just support passenger-facing teams, it also helps to simplify operations and deliver more value to leisure companies.

“One of the biggest challenges in the tourism industry is that rates fluctuate throughout the year. Companies need to be careful that the deals they’re offering passengers are profitable, and they can manage that really easily in Kaptio on Salesforce,” commented Svansson.

Teams can also use dashboards to monitor which package deals are selling, and drill down by destination to get a deeper understanding of trends across the business.

While Kaptio Travel comes with basic reports that don’t require any coding, customers can also add their own custom reports to ensure they can do everything they need to from one solution.

The platform integrates seamlessly with Marketing Cloud, giving customers a single source of truth and rich data to help shape campaigns and monitor engagement. They can also boost loyalty and retention rates by using past booking data and information from cases to promote more personalised offers, and identify areas to cross-sell and upsell.

“The beauty of Kaptio Travel is that it can replace multiple legacy systems with one solution, which also helps customers to accelerate their digital transformation strategies,” revealed Svansson. “They can plug in their own apps, which is particularly useful for localisation. Offices in China, for example, need to be able to offer Alipay and WeChat to passengers as standard, whereas in the UK people tend to use WhatsApp and PayPal.”

Kaptio Travel also simplifies managing invoices, reconciliation, and other financial transactions. Salesforce APIs make integrating solutions quick and easy, and empower customers to make changes to the platform themselves.

The platform also empowers customers with the ability to leverage a multi-market, multi-channel, multi-brand platform to consolidate operations into one system. This means when they want to expand into new markets, they already have a system that supports multiple currencies, distribution channels, and business lines at their fingertips.

“Giving customers that level of control and agility gives us an edge over the competition. They don’t have to ask Kaptio every time they need to change a workflow or add new data fields – they can truly make the platform their own, knowing we’re here to help if they need it,” commented Svansson.

Customers who work in the B2B2C sector, such as package tours offered through travel agents, often extend the platform with communities built on Experience Cloud. This enables them to integrate their payment solutions and take deposits online instantly to keep momentum when they’re closing a sale, or simplify access to support. Travel agents can also access and update their own data.

“Driving a data-driven culture is a massive trend. We’re big users of data ourselves, and we’re actively encouraging our customers and theirs to do the same,” revealed Svansson.

To ensure it’s providing customer-centric services, Kaptio captures data to understand customer needs and what they want to achieve with the platform in the future. Every year, the team publishes a roadmap setting out the new features that will be rolled out based on the most popular requests.

“We focus on changes that will have the biggest impact for the biggest number of customers,” explained Svansson. “We want to show them that Kaptio Travel is a scalable, future-proof solution that will evolve to serve customers for the long-term, not just today.”

In addition to Kaptio Travel, the company has its own in-house Salesforce platform comprising Sales Cloud, Pardot, and Experience Cloud, with Slack and Salesforce Anywhere to support collaboration and take information out of inboxes.

Sales Cloud handles leads, prospects, and account management, and feeds into dashboards and reporting to monitor KPIs, sales targets, opportunities and wins. “Different teams each have their own dashboards based on data in Salesforce – whether it’s for commercial, operations, or financial purposes,” said Jon Pickles, Chief Operating Officer at Kaptio.

Meanwhile Pardot captures leads from the website and routes them to the business development and sales teams, segments them by market, and simplifies sending out the company newsletter and other marketing emails. The team is working with Premier Success to take email marketing to the next level and expand the use of Pardot in line with pre-defined personas.

Finally, customers can submit change requests via a dedicated Salesforce community. Current plans for improvements include expanding the use of MyTrailhead, exploring artificial intelligence such as Einstein’s Next Best Action, and extending omnichannel customer support using Digital Engagement.