Mr. Federman

Reservations / Online Pricing / Booking Engines

The Art of the Online Up-Sell

By John Federman, CEO, eStara

You have put together an excellent Web site that's sleek, functional, answers customer queries and allows online customers to easily complete transactions. You've solved the e-commerce problem, right? Well...maybe not. You may have overlooked a key area of the sales process...cross-selling and up-selling.

With nearly four out of 10 travel bookers researching online but booking offline, you're probably happy to get the sales you do get online without worrying about how you can up-sell and cross-sell wary customers.

While concerns about the security of using credit cards online to pay for their purchases still plague many consumers, a recent Forrester Research report found that hotel and travel companies can potentially expedite the online sales process, and boost the total order by up-selling and cross-selling relevant products, simply by implementing tools such as online chat and click to call.

The hope is that travel sellers may be able to reduce online travelers' anxieties by offering assistance from an expert when the customer needs it most. Since most hotels started moving sales operations online, many were content to offer customers self-service tools to book their own plans online without any attempt to up-sell or cross-sell. Can you imagine a travel agent not trying to up-sell or cross-sell a customer? Why should things be any different on your Web site?

For example, Kimpton Hotel & Restaurant Group deploys click to call to give customers an opportunity to speak with an agent if they need help completing the reservation process and offers post-call surveys to customers to collect information about their experience. Through these surveys, Kimpton found that nearly 40 percent of those who used the click to call option did so because they had questions about their upcoming stay prohibiting them from booking online. This kind of information helps hotels identify spots on their Web site where live assistance can be offered to either help close sales or generate up-sell opportunities.

As we've noted with Kimpton, click to call is one tool being used to engage customers. Another is live chat. While each communications tool has its strengths, it's important to consider your resources and limitations prior to implementing either functionality.

While chat is a great tool to handle multiple routine customer service inquiries simultaneously, it requires specialized agent training and the level of personalized service is sometimes hindered by the fact that agents are chatting with more than one customer at a time.

For booking more complex itineraries, many customers still prefer the phone. This is where companies should consider click to call. Unlike chat, contact initiated through click to call can be sent to any agent in your call center. However, like chat and unlike traditional phone calls, click to call is able to send the customers online session data to your call center agent when a call is initiated. This prevents the usual customer frustration of having to "start all over again" when they transition from the Web to the phone.

Whether you decide to implement chat for customer support of click to call for sales, there are essentially four types of deployments you can use reach out to your customers with these technologies:

1. static
2. dynamic/rules-based
3. proactive
4. integrated Each offers a access to immediate live assistance for your customers. However, depending on your marketing goals and resources, some may allow for more personalized interaction with individual customers and enable hotels to offer unique cross-sell and up-sell deals to customers based on their online behavior.

Static deployments imply click to call or chat buttons are always visible to on a Web site regardless of agent availability or hours of operation.

Dynamic, or Rules-based, deployments show click to call or chat buttons only when certain criteria have been met such as the number of guests booking a room or the amount of time a customer has been idle on a page.

Proactive deployments allow individual agents to control when and where they decide to offer the click to call or chat invitation and target customers based on the pages they've visited.

Finally, integrated campaigns can either by static, dynamic or proactive. The distinguishing feature of an integrated deployment is the use of unique data integration and collaboration technology.

In this context, integrated deployments have been especially effective for hotel companies because it allows for cross-channel data passing. Cross-channel data passing relays the context of a customer's web session to a contact center agent in real-time so the customer can pick up right where they left off in the transaction process. Agents can then not only address customer queries but also initiate co-browsing sessions to guide customers through cross- and up-selling options.

During this process, it is important to earn your customer's trust. Providing personalized pitches may not always yield cross- and up-sell returns, but customers will begin to look at your company not as a vendor but as a valuable resource in their travel plans. By building customer relationships based on trust and respect, your cross- and up-selling offers will be better received and more often accepted.

John Federman is CEO of eStara. eStara’s interaction tools increase marketing and sales conversion rates for large enterprises including Starwood, Hilton, Red Lion, and Club Med. Other clients include Verizon, Amazon.com and Continental Airlines. He is responsible for strategic direction, growth and corporate vision. Mr. Federman has 20 plus years of experience with information technology and media companies. Prior to eStara, Mr. Federman was co-founder, president and CEO of Dotomi, an Internet advertising company. Mr. Federman is a graduate of UMass and holds a BA in Business and Art. Mr. Federman can be contacted at 703-842-4436 or John.federman@estara.com Extended Bio...

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