Zizoo Makes Boat Holidays Easy, Aircall Ensures Smooth Sailing

Vacations spent yachting along a stretch of white sand and clear water are no longer limited to the rich and famous. Zizoo is bringing boat holidays to the mainstream.

With options ranging from a luxury sailboat to a day trip on a catamaran, Zizoo connects charters with travelers looking for bespoke boat holidays in over 30 countries around the world.

By guiding customers through the booking process and helping plan the entire voyage, Zizoo makes finding the perfect vacation as easy as booking a hotel.

All hands on deck

When a customer’s hard-earned time-off is at stake (and saltwater is involved), response time takes priority. This is why Zizoo prefers to use the phone as their primary communication tool.

Sales reps will proactively call leads after receiving inquiries, and every customer has two support contacts at any given time. All this means Zizoo’s agents are making and receiving up to 900 calls every day.

Managing this type of call volume isn’t easy. Zizoo needed a better way to organize communications and gain access to accurate and actionable data.

Frederik Schwerdtfeger, Zizoo’s Business Development Manager, saw this vital need clearly.

“We used to have old-school phones on our desks which were incompatible with headsets. Agents had only one hand free to write stuff down and actually work.”

Workspace ergonomics aside, Frederik recognized the importance of making metrics-driven adjustments.

Scaling With Efficiency

With Aircall, Zizoo uses analytics to make informed staffing decisions.

“We started monitoring the call data, looking at what time of day most of the calls were happening and used this to optimize our shifts. We found that the fewest calls were happening in the morning, and the bulk occurred between 4-7 pm, so we actually restructured our team’s working hours to reduce the number of missed calls.”

Zizoo has also adopted a number of features that increase agent efficiency.

Aircall’s Power Dialer helps the sales team identify numbers on a webpage and automatically add them to a calling queue, converting new numbers to leads with just one click. Plus call transferring makes inter-team communication much simpler.

"In terms of efficiency it really helped a lot… It’s easier to redirect calls to other departments, easier to put calls on hold, and we now implement music during those waiting periods… We’ve noticed people staying on the line longer, so all of this helped us to become more productive and a lot faster.”

Zizoo knows the number of calls dialed directly correlates to the number of bookings they secure. Since using Aircall, Zizoo’s been able to fine tune some of their own processes, and calls per agent increased by 47% and bookings per agent increased by 31%. Having a phone system that provides better tracking and insights lets them see these trends and increase bookings.

Laying the Local Groundwork

Working in the international tourism industry with destinations across more than 30 countries means it’s important for Zizoo to have a local number in each of their markets.

Zizoo uses international numbers and a straightforward IVR menu to ensure all customers speak to a representative in their local language

“Italian clients like to call an Italian number, US clients like to call a US number... it helps build trust. We choose our numbers around the local boating industry hubs, and it makes a positive difference with customers.”

Frederik had some initial concerns about moving from a desk phone — namely about business continuity and customer loyalty (they have 20 local numbers in Berlin alone).

“It was important for us to keep our existing numbers… I worried that if we switched to a softphone we would risk losing clients who may reach an inactive number, or be less likely to pick up a call from a number they didn’t recognize.”

With Aircall’s seamless number porting, there wouldn’t be any service interruption. Zizoo was able to implement a large change with no customer-facing consequences.

Switching to Aircall has helped Zizoo operate as efficiently as possible and made sure everyone can perform at a hundred percent.

“If at the end of the day you save a couple of seconds per call, that’s 10 minutes. All of a sudden you have another 2 to 3 hours by the end of the month. It really adds up."