Entellium eSales Helps Florida Lesiure Deliver The Best Customer Service
CRM In Action
In Orlando’s highly competitive vacation market, it’s not good enough to have great values in home rentals—you have to deliver the best customer service, too. For Florida Leisure Vacation Home Rentals and Sales, delivering the level of service they wanted was becoming increasingly labor and time intensive.
Florida Leisure manages an inventory of more than 65 privately owned, luxurious 3-7 bedroom homes all,with private heated swimming pools. Unlike the typical time-share or villa setting, Florida Leisure’s properties are spread out over 4 or 5 of the most desirable neighborhoods in Orlando surrounding Walt Disney World and other tourist attractions.
The company manages rentals when the homeowners are not using the properties or if they rent them out themselves, so maintaining excellent communications with the owners and maintaining an up-to-the-minute database of availabilities is critical.
Poor Access to Information
As Florida Leisure gathered more information about their owners and renters, they found it increasingly difficult to produce reports that provided the access they needed to the data.“We had been using Access for our database, and it just wasn’t working out for what we needed,” said Florida Leisure Marketing Director Cathy Goonen. “We have an online booking engine through Rent One Online, so our customers can either go through our Web site to book homes directly or they can call us and we will place the reservation through Rent One Online.
“We take that information and put it in a backup database so that we can capture customer information and history to use for marketing purposes and customer service. We were trying to do that via Access and it just wasn’t giving us the information we needed.
We weren’t able to sort it the way we needed it, we weren’t able to get the reports we needed and it wasn’t user friendly at all.” Goonen began to search for a new solution that would give them the reporting and data retrieval they needed to manage their business.
She reviewed five server- or Web-based solutions and settled on Entellium eSalesForce. “We’re a small office with 65 homes, and we’re responsible for all the administrative work, training and follow up. We needed a tool that could automate a lot of the reporting that we were trying to do by hand. Of all of them that I checked out, Entellium was by far the most user friendly. It was the easiest for us to understand and integrate existing information from the Access system.”
No Hassle, Automated Reporting
The area of immediate improvement after the transition to Entellium was generating reports to the homeowners. Every month, Florida Leisure would pull reports from Rent One Online, which were then spread over the office floor and manually sorted. They were then converted into pdf format and emailed to each homeowner. With Entellium, they are now able to automatically generate weekly reports for internal use and monthly reports to the owners.
“We have a weekly-automated report, which is something I could never do with Access,” Goonen said. “Entellium runs the report at 12:01 Monday morning, and it downloads into my marketing assistant’s email inbox before she gets into work. The report lets her know what reservations were booked the week before and gives her all the demographics information that she needs to be able to call those guests, send them a letter and set up a schedule for follow up. It’s giving her instant access to any information she may need to be able to contact the guests.
“We also have a cumulative report that goes out to each of our homeowners monthly that keeps track of all of the bookings that have gone into their home. It tells them how much revenue they’ve taken in on each one and provides maintenance updates. That report also automatically downloads into my assistant’s email so she can quickly check it and then forward it to the homeowners. It has cut her workload in the homeowner area in half.”
At my Beck and Call
For Goonen, it’s the complete customer support that has sold her the most on Entellium. “I don’t care what time of day it is that I’m having problems, I can call or email our account manager at Entellium and I will usually get an answer within the hour. He’ll set up a time to call me, and we’ll sit on the phone and do a ‘go to meeting’ where he can actually take control of my computer and if I’m having a problem with something he’ll walk me though fixing it. I will take notes and make sure I’ve got it down to use the next
time if I encounter the same problem.
“Aside from having our account manager at Entellium at my beck and call, they have an online help desk. When we first started, I’d be at home working at night and run into a problem. I could go to the live chat and they would do the same thing as the account manager—they’d take over my computer and fix the problem. Fifteen, twenty minutes and I’m finished.”
Entellium has enabled Florida Leisure’s small staff to deliver the exceptional service they’re famous for while spending significantly less time manually managing data and reporting.
[Photo courtesy of helpscout.]
