A recent post on the Hospitality Technology website explained how a reservation sales system from NAVIS, a company providing call management services, is making West Virginia's Greenbrier Resort more successful than ever before, just like it did for BMCs’ value-added lodging operations (to increase revenue) for Florida’s central voice call center resorts, one month earlier.
The Greenbrier is a glamorous accommodation, established in 1778 and located in White Sulphur Springs, which is listed in the National Register of Historic as one of America’s finest hotels. It’s an award-winning resort resting on 10,000 acres in the Allegheny Mountains, offering more than 700 rooms, over 30 suites, and several clapboard cottages, according to its website.
Greenbrier is one of many in the lodging industry that have implemented virtual call center services to handle inquiries from prospective clients. Its call center of choice is managed by NAVIS, a company founded in 1987 in Bend, OR, that provides call management services to corporate housing industries and lodging companies. In addition to call center services, the company provides products, such as data marketing CRM solutions, to help companies maximize the return of their marketing campaigns.
Through the NAVIS system, a unique toll-free number is assigned to each particular marketing campaign; all customers calling for inquiries or bookings are tracked. Phone (News - Alert) calls are counted to provide important data to managers and, thanks to a database, agents can have access to a wealth of information on the caller before even answering. Demographics as well as information on previous calls appear on the agents’ screen and help them provide customers with prompt and more targeted service.
The NAVIS reservation sales system is also an important support in following up with clients. If a customer has placed an information-only call, agents have the option of setting reminders for follow up outbound calls. Also, if a customer is unable to reach an agent and decides to hang up without leaving any messages, the system is able to record the information and allows agents to still call them back. Calls that were previously simply lost are now getting the chance of being transformed into sales.
A similar thing is happening to calls recorded at Emerald Grande, a beach resort that also turned to reservation sales system provider NAVIS to implement a voice-focused sales optimization program to increase its revenue.
With NAVIS’ help, the Greenbrier resort has been able to increase reservation revenue by 100 percent, boost its ADR (Average Daily Rate), and produce a million dollars in outbound call revenue, Hospitality Technology (HT) reported.
In fact, the same time last year, the resorts’ call center took as many as 2,500 calls in one week; however, during the most recent week, it received close to 4,000 – a 60 percent call increase, said Nancy Tuckwiller, the Greenbrier’s director of reservations. Thanks to NAVIS call center’s tracking and follow-up capabilities, more calls are being converted to sales and, therefore, the ROI (return of investment) is particularly good.
By having implemented the NAVIS Narrowcast technology, Greenbrier’s inbound reservation system is making more revenue and converting more calls in reservations; it has also improved its offline and online marketing campaigns.
With as much as 80 percent of the reservations coming through its voice call center, by embracing the NAVIS’ solution, the Greenbrier’s staff and its agents gained the ability to initiate outbound calls at an appropriate rate, handle voice mail messages and manage outbound calls more effectively; the call center still provides customers with the ease to communicate directly with “live” agents, while managing and tracking information pertaining to every customer interaction.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson