Time is a precious commodity for both customers and employees. Making it easier and quicker for people to complete common tasks doesn’t just increase productivity, it increases profitability too. We talked to Toby Edwards, Sales Director for leading private jet charter marketplace Victor about how smarter business insights and automated processes are contributing to its efficiency mission and reputation for outstanding, high-touch customer service.

Is there a big market for private jet charters?

Yes – and it’s getting bigger all the time, across both leisure and business. In 2016, 15% of all new Victor bookings came from first-time private fliers. Our CEO, Clive Jackson, founded the company to make the private jet charter market more dynamic and accessible, which means we need to ensure our processes are cost-effective and efficient. Ultimately, we want to give back time to our customers, industry partners and, of course, team members.

What key elements have contributed to your efficiency drive?

Aside from a continual cycle of in-house product development, most notably around our web and mobile app booking platforms, working with Salesforce! Prior to this relationship, our teams were reliant on manual customer engagement processes and disparate systems.

For example, if I wanted to prioritise new customer enquiries I had to ring each person and ask several questions. Now, we automatically rate new members based on the keywords used when they register with us. This helps our customer teams understand who needs the most immediate support, and who to call next. Therefore, they work faster and smarter, and can handle many more customer accounts than our industry’s traditional brokers. 

What efficiencies have you achieved outside of sales? 

We’ve automated a number of marketing processes, allowing us to send personalised emails and newsletters to thousands of customers with minimum effort and real engagement.

Elsewhere, our Strategic Research team imports around 600 potential new customer leads from Data.com each month, from which we have already evolved a significant number of new Victor fliers. The team also uses Marketing Cloud to send targeted, personalised content based on the individual’s job title and industry. With Marketing Cloud, we can create unique customer journeys and track how different campaigns and communications help to engage and retain customers.

How did you achieve so much in such a short timeframe?

Establishing a single view of the customer was fundamental – it’s not just important for sales but also quality of service. We want to have informed conversations with our customers, and that means we need visibility of all their interactions – whether it’s a phone call with their account manager or a flight search on our mobile app.

With Salesforce, we’ve been able to integrate our core systems, such as finance and flight operations, from day one. This doesn’t just give us a 360-degree view of our customer base but the entire business. As a result, we can tap into a range of real-time analytics, learn, and further improve Victor’s service and performance.

Tell us more about how you use these analytics

We have a ‘think tank’ culture at Victor, and have become completely obsessed with Salesforce dashboards! Every customer team member has several dashboards, tracking a range of performance data such as average time to quote and customer feedback. This set-up lets us monitor closely how the team and business is performing in terms of delivering for our customers. And we are constantly adding to the data.

Typically, we capture customer feedback after every single flight – about the plane operator, the ground handlers, the terminal experience. It enables us to keep improving our customer services and engagement.

What’s been the biggest efficiency success story?

It has got to be the automated rating of new customer prospects. This has meant better use of our resources as well as more effective engagement with new Victor registrants, which in turn leads to deeper customer loyalty.

What advice would you give to someone about to implement Salesforce?

The opportunities are endless. To maximise these opportunities, it’s worth hiring someone with specialist skills. We’ve done a lot of customisation with workflows, data roll-ups, and formulas. Salesforce has been a real game-changer for us, but you only get out what you put in.

With a four-year average sales growth rate of 137%, the sky’s the limit for Victor. By improving efficiency, the company has not only boosted its revenues but its reputation for transparency, quality travel and world-class service with customers, industry partners and investors.

Learn more about how Victor is jetting ahead of the competition in their full success story.   

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