How SurfaWhile uses automation to offer personalised service in 10 mins or less

Challenge: Scaling personalised advice

Launched as a side project, Hans created SurfaWhile as a platform to share his surfing experiences in Cape Town. As his platform grew in popularity, surf camps started to contact him to be featured on SurfaWhile website. Today, SurfaWhile organises surf vacations and retreats ober 50+ destinations in 10+ countries.

With a post-COVID travel peak, SurfaWhile is striving to become a one-stop shop for surf trips for both businesses and student associations. They plan surf camps, solo surf trips, surf and language schools, surf and yoga retreats, and much more.

Because vacation or retreat is so personal, personalised service is key. But offering this personalisation to a growing number of customers has been a challenge. When Hans explored communication tools to facilitate this, he found that many were designed primarily for enterprise businesses (with a price tag to match) and still required a lot of manual work.

SurfaWhile needed to find a customer engagement platform that was affordable, easy to use, and able to automate personalised advice to each of their customers. A bonus? Automating the whole sales journey, freeing their surf-crazy employees to offer stellar tips for memorable vacations to their customers.

Solution: Automating and scaling personalised advice

SurfaWhile finally found Trengo in mid-2023 and the platform fit all of their requirements to scale their personalised service.

And how they've been using their engagement platform since is by: 

1. Automating the sales journey for lead generation

Trengo’s automated workflow helps personalise and expedite lead generation. Customers answer a few questions about their ideal surf trip, and the workflow quickly provides the most suitable options. This process is faster, scalable, and ensures consistent, high-quality replies with minimal errors.

2. Relying on the mobile app for remote teams

Unsurprisingly, for a travel company, Hans and his team are often on the go, visiting multiple surf spots. With the Trengo mobile app, Hans can seamlessly assign leads to his team without needing his laptop.

3. Steering self service with the Trengo Help Centre

SurfaWhile uses the Help Centre to provide leads and customers with information about their offerings, reducing the need for conversations in the widget and helping minimise the number of support tickets the team receives.

SurfaWhile can't do without their multichannel inbox

As the company grows, the team has added more channels like Instagram, WhatsApp, and email. With everything in one inbox, monitoring customer communication is much easier. Customers often reach out through various platforms, and the inbox allows the team to see all contact moments from different channels in one place.

Result: More leads, less time spent

The team has become much more efficient with automation. Trengo has significantly helped structure SurfaWhile’s customer communication with leads and customers. Even when experiencing over 40% growth in their customer base, they haven't needed to hire additional team members to handle excess communication— Trengo’s got that under control for them.

Instead, the team can focus on offering more personalised advice options and managing relationships with the surf camps while automation covers the sales journey.