Zoho CRM Helps Aqua Expeditions In Their Expansion To Coastal Cruising

From its beginnings in 2007, Aqua Expeditions has been providing exceptional levels of personalised, five-star service across its fleet of luxury cruise ships, enabled by a highly exclusive 1:1 crew-to-guest ratio. Today, the company is a recognized global leader in luxury small ship cruises exploring the most wildlife- and culture-rich destinations across South America and Asia. The vessels’ stylish design, luxury appointments, big-ship amenities and gourmet catering meet the exacting demands of Aqua Expeditions’ High Net Worth clientele.

Challenges

Aqua Expeditions needed to manage its complex customer database, which includes both B2B and B2C customers, on a single platform. It also wanted to effectively generate business reports and issue customized manifests for onboard use.

The company also wanted to manage a large volume of leads efficiently, and segment the database to run email and digital marketing campaigns to past customers and potential leads.

Benefits

• Centralized system helps to work and communicate effectively with the global sales and reservations team
• Efficient automated lead management
• Problem-free integration with web-based check-in and cruise booking system
• Efficient segmentation of customer database by regions, age and preferences to facilitate targeted digital marketing campaigns

When she joined the company, Aqua Expeditions’ Digital Marketing Manager, Hanh Nguyen, found that the existing processes for managing customer data were wholly inadequate. “This data was recorded all over the place - in our booking system, in sales managers’ outlook address books or in different excel spreadsheets from different users. It was a disaster,” she said. “We did have a customer database of sorts in our reservations system, but it was functionally limited and not at all user-friendly.”

Ms Nguyen realized that the Sales, Marketing, Reservations and Operation teams would not be able to work and collaborate well enough to achieve their common sales goals for the company without a professional, efficient CRM system.

“Fortunately, I was able to call on the advice of a very good consultant from Red Airship, who understood our requirements and needs,” she said. “They helped us research and evaluate popular CRM systems available in the market and advised us to choose Zoho. Our reasons for choosing Zoho are because of the robust functionalities of Zoho CRM. Also, Zoho has a wide range of applications that suit our needs, as well as its reasonable cost compared to other systems. Red Airship helped us to implement a deep custom integration of our cruise booking system with Zoho CRM, as well as leveraging many functions of Zoho"

“We now have a global Sales team from North and South America, UK, Australia, Europe and Asia who are using the Zoho CRM system. Our Direct Sales have recorded double-digit growth over the last two years" We are grateful we have implemented this system; without it, we were unable to communicate the details of all the clients and their requirements as effectively since we are based in all different time zones. It has also helped us grow and expand effortlessly, as we just launched two new boats in May 2019 and are planning to launch another in 2020. “In addition, our operations team on-shore are also able to access the CRM system to view and instantly update passengers’ details.”

The integration of Zoho CRM with the company’s web check-in system allows all customer information to be captured in the CRM system when guests check in. These data, including the customer’s dietary preferences, date of birth, e-mail address and so on are ideally maintained in the system, allowing us to provide personalized services to our customers whenever they cruise with Aqua Expeditions.