How Lafontaine Hotels generates more leads with the same team

Challenge: keeping up with the industry's digital transformation and multichannel engagement

Lafontaine Hotels & Resorts understands how the popularity of social messaging channels like WhatsApp have reshaped customer behaviour in the tourism industry. Gone are the days when the majority of customers would call to place a reservation. Since Saudi Arabia has doubled down on its tourism promotion efforts, questions and reservation requests that are coming in from interested travellers in Saudi and abroad, through social media platforms and WhatsApp have doubled. And that is in addition to phone calls via the call centre.

Initially, all social media channels and WhatsApp conversations were handled on employee’s personal phones. Often resulting in lost leads, and questions that were left unanswered whenever employees were on sick leave or out of the office. That's exactly why Lafontaine Hotels & Resorts started looking for an engagement platform that could present their team with a single source of truth and a reliable overview. So that every lead opportunity will be taken care of.

Solution: automation and operation efficiency are prioritised

Today, with the help of Trengo, Lafontaine Hotels & Resorts are levelling up their operational efficiency by consolidating their channels, like Instagram, X (formerly known as Twitter) email, and WhatsApp - into one inbox. Everyone on the team gets an access to the inbox, ensuring high team efficiency.

“We are doing more with less number of team members.”

The team also set up a few key automations to help the customer support team better the reservation system. Whenever customers now reach out via WhatsApp Trengo’s automated workflow will enable them to make a reservation without any immediate human touch. This saves the Lafontaine team a lot of time.

“We can complete a sale journey digitally, without human touch. Just using one number+966-800-244-2442.”

Result: increased lead generation, and an 80% automated customer journey

Lafontaine Hotels & Resorts' hard-earned leads are no longer lost when the team is out of the office or on sick leave. Because 17 different channels are now centralised in the inbox, every team member is on top of customer conversations. Because of the eight automations they've set up in Trengo the team is a lot more efficient.

“Trengo helps us a lot when it comes to increasing customer satisfaction and we definitely see the business value in using the platform.”

Yes the tourism industry has changed a lot, especially when it comes to communication with customers. Social messaging is now a staple and WhatsApp is more popular than ever. And the good thing is, is that Lafontaine has adopted a multichannel approach and is now future-proof. Over 50% of the leads come in via social media or online channels, and Lafontaine is now able to keep up with all of their opportunities.

Prospects are being lead through the funnel easily, because of automation. Resulting in very successful lead-generation campaigns, and happy customers that have booked a dream holiday.