Have you heard that in sales, the first person who responds to the customer’s inquiry gets 50% of the credit for locking down a transaction?
Immediacy and urgency are of utmost importance in sales. After all, what good are amazing travel packages if nobody is buying them?
Another thing to keep in mind is that competitor agencies also offer a range of great services. Finally, your client is anxious to book their trip and yours is surely not the only agency they reached out to.
Even if your offer is better and more personalized than your competitor’s, you are probably still going to lose the sale to them if they are quicker to respond.
Does your business only take requests during working hours? What if you receive an inquiry outside of business hours, during the time you’re not at the office or during your vacation?
The million dollar question is: How can you make sure that you reply to the customer first, every time?
From an inquiry to the invoice
Customers don’t wait – neither should you
Your agency has just received an inquiry for a trip to Bali. After you are finished checking the reservation items’ availability with suppliers (a very time-consuming activity we discussed in the last blog post), it’s time to create an offer for the client.
What is your approach to this task? Are you using Excel, Word or some other application to do it? How much time does it take you to create an offer for an inquiry consisting of four services: accommodation, transfer, a one-day tour and a ticket for a museum? Think of that number.
That number increases if there are additional changes to the itinerary, like changing the dates and services. And they are not uncommon in the FIT business.
All this is probably taking quite some time. And while you are taking the time to create an offer and itinerary, your agency may already be too late to respond to the inquiry. The potential customer doesn’t have time to wait!
Potential risks for making the sale
If a travel agent is quick enough to check availability with suppliers and send an offer quick enough, chances are the customer will accept the offer. When they do, it’s time to invoice the customer. If you are manually creating and sending invoices, a simple mistake might cause a lot of trouble for your agency. How?
Let’s say a customer receives the invoices and pays them. A few days later, you realize that the numbers don’t add up. You have invoiced your customer incorrectly! Now you have to apologize to your customer, resend the correct invoice and deal with all related complications. Sounds familiar?
Furthermore, issues can occur if your sales documentation isn’t centralized in one place. In other words, your inbox is full, with various local folders with many Excel and Word files, offers, itineraries, invoices, and vouchers all scattered around.
Having to find something is a nightmare. Not to mention how complicated it is to pass the work on to your colleague!
Keeping all the information about the reservation, all documents and the whole communication with your customer in one place would not only speed the sales process up but also lower the risk of error.
Automating the sales process
It would be great If you could reduce the time you spend creating the documents and replying to your customers. But wouldn’t it be even better if this whole process could happen automatically, without any work from the agent’s side?
Lemax has already helped many travel agencies and tour operators whose sales agents were spending too much time reaching out to each potential customer separately.
If you’re in a hurry, an offer and itinerary can be put together with a click of a button. After you’ve inserted a service description once, the system will use that content to automatically create the entire document. Again, no manual work by your employees is required.
Finally, when your customer confirms your booking, Lemax will automatically create and send back the invoice and voucher.
With full sales automation module, the whole communication between client, travel agency and the suppliers will be handled inside Lemax. While the system helps them handle more bookings than they ever could manually, employees will have time to focus on providing a better service to more customers.
Let’s be more specific
In Lemax, we favor results and tangible insights over words and promises. We want you to really experience how much your travel agency could benefit from automating their processes, so we put together a savings calculator which can give you an idea about the revenue increase your business could expect from automation.
Use our savings calculator to calculate how much your travel agency can save with business automation module.
It’s a very simple and clear mechanism, but here are a few tips on how to use it:
- on the left side, you will find several editable fields colored grey
- that’s where you can insert your agency’s current numbers
- as you fill out that part, the bottom of the table will be calculated automatically
- in the far right column, you will get a preview of the saved hours and increased revenue.
Try it out yourself!
Your travel agency can be next
Ensuring that your travel agency is always the first one to respond to a client’s inquiry is easy with Lemax Full sales automation module.
Working quietly in the background, it makes communication with the customers fast, efficient and error-free. Your agency will start doing more business with the same number of employees!
Finally, as a result of the reduced number of hours spent per booking, travel agents will have more time to focus on providing the best possible service for your customers, growing your revenue with every new sale.
Do you want to give your sales department superpowers?
Learn more about our sales automation
