Portals and Collaboration Success Story
Butterfield & Robinson
Butterfield & Robinson (B&R) has specialized in walking and biking tours since
1966. With a lineup of biking and walking journeys that now spans more than two
dozen countries and six continents, each route is carefully designed to immerse
travelers in the local culture and reveal a region’s true spirit. B&R’s goal is to create
one-of-a-kind journeys for active people who value their freedom and want to see
the world a little differently. B&R trips are for people who enjoy learning and
experiencing as they travel – not by listening to lectures or gazing into glass cases,
but through hands-on, cultural encounters.
Challenge
Butterfield & Robinson receive hundreds of inquiries and requests for travel
brochures and itineraries each week. In order to generate real revenue for the
company and leverage the momentum of these requests, Travel Advisors at B&R
must provide immediate response to prospects to be able to convert them to
customers.
To handle these inquiries, B&R relied on Travel Studio, their travel booking system
for customer relationship management and marketing fulfillment. Travel Studio
did not offer the complete functionality
B&R required to track important customer
requests and resulted in issues such as:
- Inability to access the right
customer information at the right
time
- Lack of visibility into customer activity history, which was required to track
customer requests for brochures and itineraries
- Limited platform for future business growth
To overcome these challenges, B&R sought one system for Travel Advisors to
access all customer data.
Solution
Ideaca Knowledge Services worked with B&R to implement the Sales module of
Dynamics CRM globally. In addition, B&R also needed CRM to be able to integrate
print and email requests that would address the distribution of company collateral
and promotions. Based on Ideaca’s recommendation, B&R implemented Microsoft
Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Beta with integration to Dynamics CRM.
The solution used MOSS 2007 to store published materials, populating all trip
related metadata from the Travel Management database (Travel Studio), using the
Business Data Catalog (BDC) and exposing it in CRM using I-Frames. This allowed
access to all customer information from one system.
By adopting this solution, B&R became the first company in North America to
deploy Microsoft Dynamics CRM and MOSS 2007 utilizing the BDC for Line of
Business integration. To capitalize on the success of this project, B&R plans to
leverage this solution as the foundation for future integration.
Benefits
Implementing MOSS 2007 Beta integrated to Dynamics CRM resulted in numerous
benefits for B&R’s staff and customers:
- Timely response to customer requests, thus improving customer experience
- Ability to provide a tailored customer interaction for each specific client
- Capability of demonstrating an acute understanding of trends to support
better decision making when creating future trips or modifying existing
customer trips
- Real-Time query capabilities – something B&R had never been able to
achieve
- Adoption of automated process steps via workflow
- Significant increase in employee productivity
- Access to the right information at the right time