Kaptio
Delivering Next-Level Traveller Experience with Salesforce CRM

Traveller expectations have changed drastically in the wake of COVID-19. The pandemic has presented unprecedented challenges for the travel industry that has historically lagged behind others in offering a connected experience. For starters, the demand for digital transformation has been triggered, prompting companies to meet new traveller expectations. Travel operators have a very specific choice right now: level up their tech and offer a high-touch connected booking and travel experience or resist digital transformation. The latter will only lead to loss of customers out of the frustration that the travel operator is not offering the same level of customer experience delivered by other industries such as retail. Surfacing intuitive touch-points no longer wows the customer; it is the expectation. Wise travel brands are using the pandemic downtime to invest in digital transformation. In essence, this transformation entails creating new (or modify existing) business processes, culture, and customer experiences with the use of digital technologies. However, travel companies are often reluctant to change their core booking platform as it would mean overhauling multiple systems that cut across their entire business. On the other hand, while implementing a new system, the challenge also stems from the hassle of configuring the system to support the key business processes, such as sales, finance, operations, customer service and product.

Set against this backdrop, helping travel operators capitalise on these trends to deliver on evolving client expectations is Kaptio, a global travel tech company with headquarters in Iceland and offices in the UK and Canada. Built on the world’s #1 CRM platform, Kaptio harnesses the power of Salesforce to deliver seamless communication and better customer experience. Kaptio caters to global travel operators that are spread across the globe, providing unique travel experiences through tailor-made itineraries and escorted tours. Kaptio has chosen to utilise Salesforce as its core travel CRM platform because it covers many of the functions every business needs without having to reinvent the wheel. Besides, the fact that Salesforce’s SaaS scalable platform is a fully configurable solution and offers high reliability with unsurpassed uptime, along with a customer-centric focus, makes it a strong foundation for Kaptio’s solution.

Competitors using legacy systems primarily focus on being a booking-centric provider. This means the single booking is at the core, simply focusing on search, cost and book. Since Salesforce has the customer record at its core, Kaptio can enable its clients to be customer-centric, putting the customer at the centre of everything. Travellers crave an end-to-end booking experience that Kaptio delivers. As the customer is dreaming, planning, booking, experiencing, and sharing, they remain at the centre naturally, resulting in customer retention and repeat bookings.

“What sets us apart from our competitors is the fact that our platform is an all-inclusive cloud solution. We incorporate sales, operations, customer service, marketing, and finance into one central system, streamlining processes whilst harnessing Salesforce’s CRM capabilities,” says Viðar Svansson, CEO of Kaptio.

Today, the ultimate goal of travel operators is to have a 360-degree view of their customer or central customer record found in their CRM and reservation platform. Built on Salesforce, Kaptio empowers travel operators with a holistic view—their team accesses the single customer record seeing touch-points of how and where the customer last engaged with their brand across chat, email, personalised proposals, and more. Kaptio also delivers hyper-personalised information, such as the amount customers are spending, reasoning behind decisions, and overall behaviour driving the purchase. Not to mention, the platform provides profitability with higher closure rates—evaluating how to capture a greater share of the customerspend with real-time data. “We knew building on Salesforce was going to give us a competitive edge and a strong foundation. In 2012, a few travel brands were exploring the use of CRM, and we were ready to deliver a more powerful all-inclusive solution that was going to shake up the industry,” mentions Ragnar Fjölnisson, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Kaptio.

The Kaptio Travel Platform comes with an Itinerary Builder—Kaptio has drag n drop functionality making changes to large (and small) itineraries effortlessly while reducing itinerary creation time. Kaptio also provides 3rd party land and air search, cost, and book functionality along with the ability to import flight bookings (known as PNR import) to further streamline processes. “We are digital-first, and our customer e-docs reflect high-touch and luxury branding with stunning imagery and the option to embed videos. We also offer custom dashboards to clients so that they can track their sales funnel and teams and access important data directly from the built-in CRM with ease,” notes Svansson. Other system strengths include contract loading with high accuracy and cloning itineraries and packages that enables users to create multiple seasons easily. Clients can get access to contracts, capacity, and reports on the go, all viewable on any web-enabled device. Kaptio’s real-time communication between Salesforce and mobile outrivals competitor apps for interactions, support, and notifications. As a cloud-based solution, Kaptio is empowering employees and teams to work from anywhere. By operating on cloud technology, Kaptio is removing the need for expensive, high-maintenance infrastructure and fast-tracking new functionality to the hands of its clients.

Kaptio’s extensible cloud platform with rich APIs make it the perfect solution for travel businesses that have a strong vision for customer experience and the relationship to their IT infrastructure. In fact, after implementing Kaptio’s travel tech, clients have seen an increase in customer satisfaction of 35 percent. Kaptio is forward-thinking and agile with a focus on enabling its clients to deliver a customer-centric experience powered by its software. Team Kaptio has created an Implementation Blueprint, giving clients a framework to set expectations and understand timelines for the entire rollout process. Kaptio’s Director of Delivery, Charlie Ellard, has led the charge with the blueprint; she’s laid the detailed plan for successful client migrations. The Implementation Blueprint is a fundamental step in offering peace of mind during technical migrations and keeping everyone on schedule.

Steering ahead, Kaptio is excited to shift its technology hubs to Iceland and the UK. “Our various successful rollouts with The Travel Corporation brands have proven to their sister operators that a more robust solution is available,” remarks Svansson. The company is pleased to be offering a third-party live inventory of land and air products from GDS and aggregators that are dynamically embedded into its search, cost, and book functionality. The Kaptio team is broadening their product offerings to serve the North American market better and strengthen their presence in this major market. Kaptio continues to invest in the traveller experience providing technology for online customer engagement, such as their interactive travel documents and support for online booking engines, trade, and traveller portals.