Keeping up to date with the latest technology is essential to stay relevant, says Travel Money Group head of marketing Clinton Hearne.
Once an “old-school” brand marketer, Hearne told AdNews around 80% of his time is now spent focused on the technology side of marketing.
“I'm a big believer you need to own the technology, otherwise you will be replaced,” he says.
The foreign currency exchange company has been working with Salesforce to improve its customer experience, particularly for those who are traveling and may need immediate support.
Hearne says offering consistent 24 hours a day, seven days a week support has been one of the biggest challenges the group has been trying to overcome.
It implemented chatbots earlier in the year to provide faster and more efficient support and has since had between 4,000 and 5,000 chatbot sessions per month.
“When we started, we were about 55% happy people [of those] that were rating - not that everyone does. We're up to about 74% now,” Hearne says.
Introducing the bots has raised both challenges the company didn’t know it was facing and opportunities that it could take advantage of.
“To be truthful, it's helped us to prioritise some tech stacks. It's highlighted key areas of where we needed to improve the product but then also informs our decisions on the opportunities,” he says.
“The other one is how we train the call centre because some people still call them. So, we've gone back and looked at how people ask the questions and then [make sure] we're giving that same message across both.”
Now he says the business is trying to educate customers to preference the bot over email or calling kiosks for queries.
“There were a lot of email enquiries and people didn't get back in 24 or 48 hours [which is] not great,” he says.
“A lot of angry people then on social. We've seen that reduced by about 25%, which is awesome.”
Customers are still given the option to choose to talk to an operator or send an email though – it is all about customer choice.
“Travel Money, specifically, I think has a very good customer-first outlook. We're really trying to move, which is different for an older business like us.”
AdNews attended Dreamforce as a guest of Salesforce.
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