Based in the South Island of New Zealand, Wayfare comprises five leading tourism brands: Cardrona Alpine Resort, Treble Cone, Go Orange, Real Journeys, and the International Antarctic Centre.
Looking for a way to create business efficiencies by lightening the load on their frontline team and better manage customer queries for the International Antarctic Centre, Wayfare decided to implement Yonder chatbot.
Before hooking up Yonder chatbot, all of the International Antarctic Centre’s customer queries were being managed in person through the team on the ground and through Facebook messages by the social media content team, taking up a huge chunk of their time.
The chatbot generates a good number of clicks through to their booking system (approx. 10% of chats). By integrating with the International Antarctic Centre’s booking system Fareharbor, the chatbot is able to answer with live availability of their tours, and link customers through to book them.
“Being able to integrate with FareHarbor is something we find pretty exciting. This integration means we have the ability to add in booking and live availability queries which takes it to that next level. The capability of the Yonder chatbot is definitely beyond any other chatbots that we’ve used in the past.”
In terms of whether Yonder chatbot has had a positive impact on the business, the results speak for themselves. Within 90 days of using Yonder, they were getting 40 times more conversations than Facebook Messenger alone. That has a meaningful impact given many of those chats would have otherwise been emails or phone calls to customer service. For example, “Are you open?” and “what are your opening hours?” are in the top 3 questions asked through chat and resulting in a massive reduction of trivial enquiries to the customer support team.
“The benefits of Yonder have been twofold — from a customer experience perspective we’re way more responsive, as the bot responds to customer queries straight away. We’re also operating more efficiently — we’ve been able to free up time for our staff who were manually responding to all queries so now they’re able to focus on other important parts of their roles.” says Rachel.
Tools like Yonder are helping the International Antarctic Centre team continue to deliver great experiences despite staffing constraints due to Covid. “It means our contact centre isn't getting an overflow of questions and our customers are finding it easier to get the information they need.”
The chatbot is set up to act autonomously, and will only gather email addresses for the frontline team to respond to if required.
Chatbot users are getting answers to their questions quickly, and they’re happy about it. In fact, ‘thanks’ is mentioned, unprompted, an impressive 22 times per month!
Through Yonder chatbot, Wayfare are able to see the key questions that customers are asking about the International Antarctic Centre which helps them understand what customers are wanting, or in turn, what they need to improve.
“The questions that are being asked show if there’s information that’s just not clear on the website. Off the back of this, we update and make it easier for all website customers to find it and understand it.”
“The questions also reinforce what’s important to our customers, so that we make sure we’re focussing on the right areas. For example, we know that deals are important when we can see that so many are clicking on it in the chatbot.”
During the setup process, the customer facing team were crucial in pulling together all the questions for the chatbot and mapping out potential customer journeys. “When implementing Yonder, it was really important to get input from our frontline team as they were the ones who were managing all of the queries up until that point.” Says Rachel.
About the International Antarctic Centre
Since 1992 the International Antarctic Centre has been transporting visitors to an incredible world of ice and mystery, ambition and endeavour. Located on the International Antarctic Programme’s working campus at Christchurch Airport, the centre has become renowned as one of New Zealand’s most diverse and dynamic tourist attractions. The range of interactive experiences provide fun, education and excitement for visitors of all ages. To learn more, head to iceberg.co.nz
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