How TravelBird improves their customer experience with a single SMS
This month Airbnb sent me an SMS about a booking for my Amsterdam apartment, Google verified my identity with it and Deliveroo texted me about my food delivery. Why? SMS is ubiquitous, platform-independent and we get so few that 99% of us open them (e-mail only 30%).
The fast-growing TravelBird takes it one step further: they started providing customer support over SMS to their travellers internationally. The Amsterdam-based travel startup offers daily deals in 12 countries: from romantic breaks and round trips to long-haul holidays and anything in between. Regardless of the offer, they always focus on customer experience and that’s where they use MessageBird and Zendesk to get ahead.
One single SMS
Think about it: you’ve just landed on your sun-soaked destination and the last thing you want to do is check that inbox full of e-mails. It might just be the thing you try to get away from for a few days. Forget about it, you don’t even want to enable mobile internet as you will easily hit your data limit checking e-mails or Facebook while roaming. So, there’s a big chance that you miss that last minute update from TravelBird.
That’s why TravelBird sends you an SMS as well on the morning of your departure, wishing you a wonderful holiday and offering the possibility to contact customer support by simply texting back. “By sending that one SMS message and being able to reply to it from within Zendesk, we have such a powerful impact on the experience of our travellers”, says Robin Doezie, Team Lead Marketing at TravelBird. “We started testing this with our Dutch customer base and in the first few weeks alone we got hundreds of positive responses from surprised travellers. Some of them even sent us detailed updates on how great their first day had been. But even more important were the moments where we could immediately solve an inconvenience before it grew into something that could potentially ruin someone’s holiday. That’s the most valuable part of offering this to our travellers: we’re always there when they need us, in the easiest way possible.”
The impact on NPS
Being able to provide support internationally and acting on customer issues when they happen — instead of receiving complaints after people get back home when the damage has already been done — shows a positive impact on TravelBird’s Net Promoter Score (NPS). The test group was more responsive to the NPS survey (+18% higher response rate) and TravelBird’s NPS score increased by 6,8% within that same group.
Doezie: “For any ambitious company, scalability and international deliverability matters. That’s why we used MessageBird’s SMS Gateway to integrate its service in Zendesk.”
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