Key Facts
| Industry |
Travel |
| Business need |
Tracking of marketing activity |
| Xarios solution |
Phone Client |
Greate Rail Journeys
About Great Rail Journeys
Great Rail Journeys (GRJ) are specialists in escorted
holidays by train. As the UK's largest rail based holiday company,
they offer over 200 individual rail tours to over 40
countries. With over 30 years of experience they
understand exactly what makes a holiday by train successful.
The Tour Managers on their holidays have a passion for travel
and an in-depth knowledge of their specialist region. In addition
to the recognition they have received for responsible tourism,
Great Rail Journeys is also a full member of ABTA and AITO. This
means that they are committed to providing high standards of
business practice for the benefit of their guests, their staff and
the travel industry at large.
The Challenge
Great Rail Journeys pride themselves on good customer service
and invest in specialist marketing techniques to communicate their
packages. An effective CRM process was already in use by Great Rail
Journeys in the form of a travel reservations system called
'Traveller' by Webapps which is a specialist suite of software for
the travel industry. However, they needed it to work more
efficiently.
They wanted to track the success of different marketing avenues
from pay per click, websites, off the page advertising, brochures
and many more. Having more than one brand, it was also important
for Great Rail to automatically identify the brand as well as the
marketing media source.
The Xarios Solution
Xarios supplied Great Rail with the Xarios Phone Manager
software. Upon receiving or making a phone call the software
screen-pops the customer's database, meaning the agent doesn't need
to ask for the customer's details and conduct a manual search. The
marketing source is automatically populated from the dialled
number, quickly highlighting the most effective sources of
marketing. Therefore the money spent on the lowest responses to
marketing can be repeatedly invested in the highest responses to
marketing and the return on investment from marketing spend will be
dramatically increased.
"One of the key benefits of the Xarios Phone Manager is that it
has enabled us to get maximum cost efficiency from our marketing
activity."
Mark Taylor, Great Rail Journeys
What makes Xarios different?
Xarios integrated their Phone Manager software with Webapp's
Traveller to provide Great Rail with a resourceful and
cost-effective way to improve their CRM operations. Through a
collaborative development program between Xarios and Webapps UK,
Xarios phone manager was modified and deployed as an Active X
control and embedded into the Traveller application.
"The Xarios team are very approachable and provide a quick
turnaround in responding to any issues that may arise, albeit very
few."
Mark Taylor, Great Rail Journeys
With the Xarios Phone Manager, Great Rail are able to identify
where their marketing spend is best invested, meaning they are not
wasting money advertising in the wrong places.