A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives: a curated forum reserved for leaders nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the Construction Tech Review Advisory Board.
Wyndham Destinations [Nyse:Wynd]
Pushing the boundaries of Salesforce capabilities to put the world on vacation
Wyndham Destinations’ aspirations to extend and grow the brand beyond the traditional timeshare business isn’t something the company could achieve without knowing our customers better and making it easier for our associates to do their jobs.
Thanks to a new customer experience mindset, Wyndham Destinations increased consumer trust and delight. More insight and data on owners will also allow the company to better anticipate and plan for the future. This transformation revolutionized how Wyndham Destinations--and the timeshare industry – does business, making the customer experience seamless and customized, transcending any vacation ownership experience out there.
A Salesforce transformation changed the way the company approached its offering, starting with hand held tablets to sign up for tours. This front-end interaction is crucial for sales, and ditching carbon copy paper for digital meant the time it took to book a tour was reduced by 70 percent, to just a few minutes. At the same time, Wyndham Destination employees were provided with the tools to do their jobs more easily.
We worked with our business and technology teams, in partnership with PWC, to eliminate the friction of a paper process, use the power of personalized connection, and make the tour process less cumbersome for employees and buyers. This collaboration also built out robust data to create loyalty, spur repeat business, and open the door to a future beyond timeshares. The result is something the industry thought was impossible: digitize the business to make data and technology create an even stronger connection with the customer than what humans could do alone.
A cultural change effort and an investment in the employee experience was customized for teams across the company, meeting employees where they were and bringing them into the new, digital culture. The payoff: a better and more efficient way of working, fueled by technology, for everyone at the company, coupled with a robust guest and owner profile that enhances the experience for everyone.
A better, more personal experience for customers was the priority, but to get there, every employee who interacted with a potential buyer needed to believe in a new way of doing things and adapt to a culture that was more relationship and technology based. A set of ambassadors, a marketing council, and sales and marketing leaders were assembled to make certain we accounted for what mattered to the people on the ground; a system built for the users by the users. These ambassadors brought change ideas to their teams and gathered feedback. In a sales-driven culture, employee experience is crucial to a great customer experience.
“We’re thrilled to partner with Wyndham Destinations and make it easier for their teams to cross-collaborate using the power of the Salesforce Customer 360 platform,” said Taimur Khan, VP and GM of Travel, Transportation and Hospitality at Salesforce. “Wyndham Destinations was looking for ways to transform its business and continue gaining the trust of its guests through frictionless experiences. In order to do this, it needed to connect all the stakeholders in the guest journey spanning owners, guests, and employees and unify the experience. We helped them accomplish this first with its sales and marketing teams and are now excited to move into the next phase of implementation with them.”
Digitizing the business revolutionized the way Wyndham Destinations’ teams worked – and education, team rallies, and the opportunity to try out the new tech were crucial to rounding out the employee experience. And for owners and potential buyers, the experience went from bumpy and impersonal to relatable and modern.
Now that we’re into the first year of our Salesforce implementation, we’re building a robust set of data from which we can start making smart business decisions about how to manage our sales and marketing operations.
A Salesforce transformation changed the way the company approached its offering, starting with hand held tablets to sign up for tours
We started off leveraging Salesforce as our customer scheduling platform so that sales and marketing teams could engage with the customer at every stage of the sales process. With the booking system replacement we implemented, we can connect the whole customer journey to the Salesforce platform earlier in the customer lifecycle, so we know more about the needs of our customers when they come in and try our product.
Now we’re moving beyond the initial implementation to leverage Einstein Analytics, the Salesforce dashboard tool to have real-time knowledge of our sales performance at any point during any day. And we’re working with the Salesforce team to challenge the boundaries and push the capabilities of Einstein farther than most companies are doing at this point.
Because of the real-time data we’re getting, we’re able to pinpoint what’s happening at any location in our system and make on-the-fly adjustments to the team or their objectives from anywhere. And because we’re more connected to our customers, we can provide a better experience for them from the moment they arrive at a resort – making our customers happier and making our teams more efficient.
Moving forward, we’re going to be able to continue to drive mobility, accessibility, and real-time decision making that is going to drive a frictionless vacation experience and make it easier to get the world on vacation.
