How Travel Expert Group captures 3X more leads and turn them into sales faster

Founded in 1986 in Hong Kong and listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2011, Travel Expert Group offers tailored and memorable travel experiences. They operate two brands: Travel Expert, for the broader market, and Premium Holidays, for those looking for luxury tours. 

The group’s services cover everything needed for a trip—places to stay, ways to get around, event tickets, guided tours, and customized travel plans. We've teamed up with over 200 companies, including airlines, tourism organizations and financial institutions, to make sure we can offer customers a wide range of options.

Customer engagement challenges faced by the travel and hospitality business 

Manually handling enquiries from multiple channels slowed down business

Travel Expert Group aims to simplify access to personal travel advice for their customers. That's why both their brands are available on WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram, making conversations convenient and friendly. However, manually managing these chats has led to slow responses and missed opportunities. 

Difficulty coordinating lead follow-ups impeded tracking campaign effectiveness

Additionally, without a systematic way to track interactions across platforms, Travel Expert Group has found measuring campaign effectiveness and understanding customer preferences a challenging task.

SleekFlow’s customer engagement solution for travel and hospitality industry 

1. Centralize conversation management

Travel Expert Group centralized all messages from six different messaging accounts into SleekFlow to manage conversations better. Leveraging a large number of Facebook followers, they ran numerous social media campaigns. People often left comments showing their interest, and SleekFlow was used to automatically reply, asking for details like name, travel date, and destination. This approach helped engage more with posts and identify potential customers.

2. Create WhatsApp chatbot for discovery

Travel Expert Group encouraged social media and website visitors to use WhatsApp for booking travel packages or getting special deals. They used the Flow Builder to set up a WhatsApp chatbot that handles questions automatically. Customers can easily find out about the latest deals, products, giveaway programs, and order statuses by chatting with this bot.

3. Automate qualifying questions

The chatbot can answer some questions immediately, but if a question requires a human touch, it gathers most of the necessary details first. Staff can then collect the essential information internally, shortening the back-and-forth time.

4. Route conversations to a dedicated agent and add collaborators

Teams from marketing, sales, and customer support all use the omnichannel team inbox, making collaboration and tracking service quality easier. Everyone can contribute or leave notes for others with a clear reference to the conversation history. Plus, SleekFlow was integrated with the internal system, allowing the team to see customer details during a chat, helping them respond quickly and accurately.

5. Segment customers and send retargeting broadcast

By analyzing customer interactions with the chatbot, Travel Expert Group organizes customers based on their interests or behaviors. Labels identify customer preferences, grouping those with similar interests into lists. For retargeting campaigns, messages can be broadcast to the right group of customers all at once.

Enhancing speed to lead and boosting sales

SleekFlow's automation has helped Travel Expert Group turn leads into sales faster. For instance, after sharing a flash sale on social media that received 10,000 inquiries, they were able to identify leads more likely to buy based on extra steps taken during chatbot interaction. This approach reduced the response time by 25% because all necessary information was already available to assist customers.

Using WhatsApp has been beneficial for understanding customers better due to its personal nature. Information gathered from WhatsApp chats has been used to target ads more effectively, increasing the number of inquiries by 3X.