Globus reimagines the customer experience with Dynamics 365

Globus family of brands operates worldwide, transporting hundreds of thousands of guests on the trips of their dreams every year. Unifying its global fleet of systems and understanding its guests’ preferences with Microsoft Dynamics 365 opened new passageways to growth and enabled the Globus family of brands to deliver even more exceptional experiences.

Globus family of brands is one of the world’s leading tour operators, offering exclusive experiences curated for every type of traveler. It all started with a single rowboat on Lake Lugano and grew into a fleet of motorcoaches touring the world. Globus family of brands has spent nearly a century perfecting the art of travel planning and today, the Globus family of brands includes Globus, Cosmos, and Avalon Waterways. The group of companies consists of more than 30 tourism and aviation businesses, serviced by more than 5,000 professionals. The companies’ escorted and independent vacations offer nearly 10,000 departures and almost 300 different itineraries, covering more than 70 countries on six continents. Everyone from budget-minded adventurers to luxury-seeking VIPs can experience a world beyond their expectations. Whether it’s a spacious, state-of-the-art excursion through the islands of the Adriatic Sea, a nostalgic Canadian Rockies rail journey, or a motorcoach tour through Europe’s undiscovered gems, Globus family of brands offer a world of ways to travel the globe. 

Opening new doors

The COVID-19 pandemic up-ended the global travel industry. Even as restrictions eased, leisure travel rates remained uncharacteristically low. Like its peers, Globus family of brands was forced to downsize. But the company saw this global moment of resetting expectations as an opportunity to execute an internal reset.

Before the pandemic, the company had been steadily expanding its reach all over the world. But with offices in different countries, each with its own systems for managing customer data, Globus family of brands leadership lacked the visibility that’s vital for growth and meaningful customer insights.

Globus family of brands realized that a return to profitability would require a significant transformation to better serve existing customers—and attract new travelers excited to get back on the road. Modernizing and simplifying its business processes and operations and understanding its customers in new ways would allow the company to deliver even better experiences as the world reopened for business.

The key that unlocked new process efficiencies, provided a richer, more meaningful view of customer data, and was flexible enough to scale as the company grew would open the door to a new way of doing business in a new world of travel. The right solution would drive three main business objectives: attract and retain customers, improve customer experiences, and improve workforce productivity.

Solutions like Salesforce and Marketo were tempting, but Globus wanted a holistic approach that would drive business for the long term, not simply solve a single pain point. Given the breadth of operations by the Globus family of brands and the scale of its customer base, the Microsoft ecosystem was the clear choice for its modernization initiative.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 was the key Globus family of brands was looking for.

Setting out together on the marketing, sales, and service journey

First and foremost, Globus family of brands wanted to gain a deeper understanding of its millions of customers and their preferences. It also wanted to use their feedback to improve not only its travel offerings but also the way it does business.

In early 2023, Globus family of brands selected Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Data, Customer Insights - Journeys, Sales, and Customer Service to help it achieve its customer relationship goals. The South Pacific offices already used Dynamics 365 and were the ideal sites to deploy the solution first, blazing the trail toward a global implementation that will ultimately connect the company’s sales, marketing, and customer service activities.

The company started by creating a central architecture to consolidate its sales and marketing data in a harmonized system that serves as a single source of information for critical applications. Now, marketing and service teams in the Oceana region operate seamlessly with a unified, cloud-based system that requires minimal maintenance. With the various on-premises legacy systems gone, Globus family of brands realized an immediate benefit—reduced maintenance, hardware, and licensing costs.

With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Globus family of brands has a 360-degree view into the sales pipeline for its customer profiles. Before Customer Insights, that kind of understanding would have required data scientists, SQL, and Python scripts. Now, insights are at users’ fingertips. Karl Merckel, VP, Technology, says, “Dynamics 365 gives us a complete picture of our customers and has made a big difference in how we serve our loyal travelers.”

Customer Insights gives Globus family of brands marketing and sales teams a better understanding of their customers’ preferences and sales history and helps them reach customers by email at the right time in the sales journey. Service agents can see which callers are repeat customers—an impressive 20% at least—and are already equipped with information about the customer when they answer a call. Nithin Vanam, Power Platform Lead, explains, “when speaking with our customers, our agents have a head start in understanding their preferences and history, so they can better tailor their experience and focus on selling the right product, rather than spending days together on something that may not meet the customer’s needs.”

The Customer Insights advanced marketing solution equips Globus family of brands’ regional offices with a standard, user-friendly set of relationship and marketing tools and real-time visibility into every customer’s sales journey. Sales teams take advantage of built-in marketing capabilities to make their work easier and more relevant to customers, like customizable email templates and simple creation of region-specific email campaigns with follow-up marketing flows. With easy access to the customer’s current position in the pipeline, teams can use flow diagrams to easily track the appropriate next steps in the selling cycle. 

Dynamics 365 Sales simplifies and automates the sales cycle and eliminates mundane tasks with the promise of enriching customer relationships and increasing revenue. Globus family of brands salespeople are more productive, and leadership has a clear picture of every region’s growth trajectory. An accurate snapshot of the current sales status and accurate sales forecasts based on solid data ensure a predictable pipeline funnel. Sales managers now rely on clear data visualizations to get a feel for trends and can quickly adjust to changes in the business. “We have the confidence to focus on the right areas of the pipeline using Dynamics 365 Sales data visualization capabilities,” says Merckel.  

Dynamics 365 Customer Service and the simplified Dynamics 365 Contact Center offers modern capabilities to Globus family of brands customer service teams, like an omnichannel dashboard with a full view of customer account activity that’s fully integrated with Teams for easy collaboration with colleagues. A central customer portal is also integrated with the omnichannel dashboard, making agents’ jobs easier and improving the customer experience.

The voice channel unlocks data that helps both customers and Globus family of brands users. Take customer complaints, for example. The legacy system didn’t allow for verification of a customer’s claims. Now, conversations are tracked, making confirmation and resolution much easier and customers much happier. From a training perspective, Globus family of brands can use real calls to demonstrate how to resolve issues, assess feedback, and validate customers’ experiences. Agents feel better equipped, customers feel better served, and everyone enjoys the time saved.

As a bonus to both productivity and simplicity, agents are now working in a single customer service workspace instead of having to switch between applications and calls as in the legacy system. They can have multiple sessions open, reducing the time they spend on post-call activities.

Onward bound

Globus family of brands is driving business growth with Dynamics 365 and isn’t slowing down. The company looks forward to incorporating Microsoft Copilot into its mix of productivity tools to further simplify the work of its internal teams. Features like chatbots, conversational sentiment indicators, and knowledge articles will drive faster, more thorough customer service, helping Globus family of brands deliver “wow” in the world one scene, one sight, and one story at a time.