Reinventing Customer Engagement for a Global Cruise and Travel Company

An established industry player wanted to reinvent the cruise ship category, from the brand touchpoints online during booking, to the immersive onboard experience, to post cruise loyalty and relationship management.

The Approach

A crucial part to rethinking the business model was implementing a cohesive customer engagement platform, built around Salesforce Cloud offerings. Salesforce products include Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Community Cloud. Marketing Cloud is leveraged for campaign management and one-on-one email marketing to guests throughout the cruise lifecycle including pre-booking, post booking, pre-sail and post sail activities. Sales Cloud is used as the base CRM and all activity up to booking. Capgemini integrated Sales Cloud to the reservations engine to allow easy capture of booking details, referrals, past guest activity, as well as a capturing a rich set of attributes about the guest’s preferences and on-board activity to be used in future direct marketing. Service Cloud is the basis for customer service issues including individual experience-related issues and broad issues affecting the sailing itself, including those that may arise due to severe tropical weather. Salesforce Community Cloud is being used as the basis for a travel agency portal. The Community is also tightly integrated with the reservations system and the content management system to allow travel agents to access rich content about the trips, including deck plans, shore excursions, etc.

There are other components of the overall systems, including a “Next Best Action” recommendation engine integrated with Salesforce for recommendations pre-sail, at the pier, on board, and post sailing.

Salesforce is being used as the overall customer engagement platform, but the true transformation is enabled with integration to other systems including cruise reservations, data warehouse and reporting marts, websites, on board systems, content management repository, and the recommendation engine.

Results

With the successful launch of the new cruise brand and experience, the company is seeing strong online bookings in preparation for their inaugural cruise. The integrated Salesforce platform is enabling true end-to-end customer engagement.