Exodus welcomes customers from all over the globe and all walks of life. Some seek once-in-a-lifetime adventures, many trust Exodus with luxurious family getaways, and others want inspiration to discover unforgettable destinations.
Aligning with Travelopia’s mission to enrich lives through travel, Exodus commits to giving all its customers flawless customer service and communication at every touch point, online and off.
Having expanded organically over the decades, the business had outgrown its legacy technology, which left the customer care team working overtime to maintain its renowned service levels.
Without centralised systems, the team relied on emails, reminders, spreadsheets, documents, and time-consuming manual processes to manage customers, from capturing the initial lead to booking and delivering the trip.
For example, to create a basic email broadcast, the team had to export a CSV file from the booking system and manually clean and segment the data to avoid sending irrelevant offers. This process took up to four hours per email.
However, Exodus' fundamental challenge was that its bookings and reservations were disconnected from its prospect and customer database. As with any established travel operation, its legacy reservation platforms are complex and embedded with third-party tools.
Enter Alex Barber, Exodus’ Head of CRM and RevOps. A proven CRM, business automation, and data analytics expert, Alex was brought on to integrate and streamline processes from sales pipeline and CRM to trip management operations and after-sales service.
“When I started, our service teams were chasing up leads without a view of how well they converted or what they cost to attract. The only reliable analytics we had was bookings. There was no attribution from marketing or sales activity,” says Alex.
Alex's top priority is empowering his team with the right tools to delight customers with seamless communication and service.
When Alex joined, Exodus had just started using HubSpot Marketing Hub to send and track customer emails. With success using HubSpot in past roles, Alex identified its potential more broadly to streamline sales processes and remove operational friction at every step in the customer journey. Other Travelopia brands have also switched to HubSpot with proven results.
“HubSpot was a no-brainer for me. Having worked as an automation consultant for years, I believe it’s the best platform out there for unifying customer care. It was a natural move to transition our sales, marketing, and services processes to HubSpot,” says Alex.
Alex knew the only way to achieve Exodus’ long-term growth and efficiency objectives was to set up a real-time, two-way synchronisation between the legacy reservations system and HubSpot.
Starting with a focus on Sales Hub, Exodus’ in-house team collaborated with their HubSpot Account Manager to deploy a comprehensive API data integration mapped directly into its live reservation and booking systems.
Offering hundreds of different trips – all with various options, pickup locations, preferences, availability, and add-ons – managing the inventory and logistics matrix is like calculating an algorithm. In addition, customers can book trips online, via travel agent systems, or over the phone.
Regardless of how these bookings come in, every detail is now accurately captured in Sales Hub and accessible by service and operations teams.
Once a customer has booked, Exodus uses Service Hub to track and manage end-to-end logistics – such as travel arrangements, dietary requirements, transfers, tickets, service preferences, etc – and communicate all these to the operations crew on the ground to bring the booking to life.
Using Service Hub’s feedback surveys, the team can rapidly see how a trip went. If it scores well, the sales team can schedule follow-up emails with inspiration for future trips.
If a problem is identified, a service representative can be prompted to make a proactive phone call to fast-track a resolution.
With Marketing Hub, Exodus curates vast amounts of data on every customer from every touch point, such as pages viewed, forms submitted, searches made, purchase history, live chat engagements, loyalty program activity, and much more.
Most importantly, its intelligent segmentation tools detect and assess purchase intention and personalise communications based on this granular activity.
Dynamic segmentation nurtures loyalty and return bookings
Exodus has also created several specific ‘swim lanes’ with automatically tailored workflows to nurture customers along the journey, segmenting them into prospects, pre-travel, post-travel, and frequent travellers.
These targeted groups are dynamically generated based on dozens of specific actions and touchpoints, which enables automated workflows, targeted marketing, and fully personalized communications. This data-driven approach increases service quality and marketing effectiveness without increasing staff workloads.
Exodus has recently launched a programmatic direct mail 'welcome home' campaign. It uses HubSpot's API to integrate with a printer and send personalised postcards featuring a photo of their destination. These postcards serve as a thoughtful memento of the trip and encourage rebooking.
Before HubSpot, Exodus relied strongly on gut feel and manual work. With disconnected systems, data, and bookings, marketing was not targeted or tracked, and service delivery was complex and time-consuming.
Once Exodus and HubSpot had done the API integration work to centralise customer and booking information, the benefits were game-changing for their staff and customers.
Now, when prospects search the website, join newsletters, click on ads, call to ask questions, submit inquiries, or chat online, all that information is unified in one customer record and accessible to all departments.
“When customers call us, or we reach out to them, we know precisely what interests them and all their past engagements with us. So, it’s easy to match them up with a trip they’ll love and close more deals faster.”
This saves the operations and services team significant time, effort, and hassle in the backend. It also allows Exodus to track the cost-per-conversion of sales outreach and marketing spend and tailor and optimise activity.
“We’re not flying blind anymore! Real-time analytics dashboards let managers see the performance of teams, locations, individual salespeople, and campaigns. Now we have a view of the entire funnel from marketing and leads to quotes, reservations, and bookings,” says Alex.
For example, the team can now effortlessly slice and dice the data in a few clicks to create and send highly targeted and personalised emails within 5 minutes rather than the 4 hours it took previously.
HubSpot enables Exodus to nurture and strengthen customer relationships on any channel, online and off, so it’s no surprise that 97% of their customers recommend them to others.