Clients:

eatigo

Products:

Sales Cloud,Service Cloud,Marketing Cloud

Impact:

150% Increase in Service case closure

Restaurant reservation platform Eatigo is ready to take on the world with Salesforce

Restauranteurs in Southeast Asia must be very thankful for Eatigo. The restaurant reservation platform uses a demand-based pricing system to help its member restaurants maximise off-peak capacity. The company achieves this by giving restaurants the capability to offer strategic time-based discounts to customers.

Since launching simultaneously in Singapore and Thailand in 2013, Eatigo has become a leading reservation app in SouthEast Asia. The company has now seated over 5 million diners at more than 4,000 restaurants in its burgeoning network, and has expanded to Hong Kong, Malaysia, India and the Philippines.

Now backed by global travel booking giant TripAdvisor, Eatigo is facing a bright future as the company plans to continue its expansion across Southeast Asia and into the rest of the world.

Four senior former telecommunications professionals from Thailand, Singapore, India and Germany came together to start the company in 2013. They found inspiration in the uber competitive airline and hotel markets that use demand-based pricing and discounted rates to keep their airplanes and hotel rooms full during off-peak times.

“We found that many restaurants in the region operate at less than 35 per cent capacity, so we saw enormous potential there for a technology platform to come in and help restaurants maximise their capacity and significantly increase their revenue,” says Siddhanta Kothari, CFO and one of the co-founders of Eatigo.

TripAdvisor saw the potential too, and became a major investor in Eatigo in 2016. The company is now poised to continue its growth through Southeast Asia, with the ultimate goal to become a major player in the global market. 

Taking control of the pipeline with Sales Cloud

Eatigo’s success has not come without its challenges. Launching in six countries in less than five years is ambitious, and managing such rapid growth was not easy.

In Eatigo’s early days, the busy sales department used free CRM tools to manage the sales pipeline, however these basic platforms were simplistic and lacking in the capabilities required.

“Many leads were forgotten or not fully capitalised on and we couldn’t see the sales cycle or even monitor the workload,” says Kothari. “This made it impossible to track the performance of our sales staff and gave us no real reporting power.

“Coming from corporate backgrounds in the telco industry, the four founders understood the importance of effective sales management, and we agreed that Salesforce is the gold standard.”

Following their partnership with TripAdvisor, Kothari and the Eatigo management team decided they could wait no longer and deployed Sales Cloud simultaneously in six cities in May 2016.

“Sales Cloud meant that we could better manage our sales staff and the sales pipeline to ensure full efficiency, while increasing our lead fulfilment and centralising sales processes across all our territories,” Kothari explains.

“With Sales Cloud, we can now see how many leads are getting burnt out and are able to appropriately reallocate those leads. It also allows us to better manage our relationships with our large global clients like Marriott Hotels that are very important to us.”

Professionalising customer service with Service Cloud

With the sales function humming, Kothari and his team turned their attention to B2B and B2C support and service. They were using manual Excel spreadsheets for customer management, and Kothari is the first to admit this was less than ideal.

“We didn’t know what type of cases were being raised, were not tracking the problems that our merchants were seeing, and were not monitoring the complaints that were coming in,” he says. “Obviously, this had to change.”

Kothari and his team were also facing the immense challenges of operating in six different markets, all of which are at vastly different levels of eCommerce development with varying customer and merchant needs and expectations.

“Prior to deploying Service Cloud, on average we were closing about 10 cases per day, per agent. Since deploying Service Cloud, that has gone up to 25 closed cases per day, per agent. There were so many missed cases that were not being responded to,” says Kothari

“The time it takes us to close a case has also improved significantly since we started using Service Cloud – we now close 100 per cent of our cases within a week, and most of our cases are now closed within two days. Prior to that, we were not even closing 50 per cent of the cases. This has been a significant improvement.” 

Revealing new customer insights with Social Studio

Another important benefit of Salesforce, says Kothari, is the seamless interaction it allows between sales reps and customer service staff.

 

“On the B2B side, it’s very important for our service staff to understand how the relationship started and what promises were made by the sales staff before they respond to a case. 

They need to understand what the merchant’s expectations are, and that communication has become seamless with Salesforce.”Kothari and his team are also revealing many new customer insights through their use of Social Studio from Marketing Cloud that is giving them the power to track – and respond to – what is being said about the company online.

“On a daily basis we are getting about 75 to 80 social mentions that we are now tracking with Social Studio,” he says. “We find that around 15 to 20 mentions per day need our attention, which we previously had no way of identifying before we started using Social Studio.

“We are now better able to understand our users’ pain points. For example, we never realised how much difficulty our users were having fulfilling our marketing promotions. Social Studio allows us to identify and address those problems before they spiral on social media.“Since using Salesforce, we have been able to move from a reactive response to a proactive approach across our entire business. And this will be valuable as we continue to take steps toward our goal of becoming a leading regional and global presence.”