Ocean Holidays’ new offices have themed offices, breakout area and canteen. Winged Boots has a client consultation room
th new home and Winged Boots
to be close to our clients, be their friends, because that’s what we enjoy. “If we get this right, it’s a really
exciting networking and brand affiliation opportunity. Plus it’s scalable, and we are not going to be entering any pay-per-click wars with other classic luxury travel operators. “The average order value of an
Ocean Florida customer is £7,000, but when they go to Las Vegas or the Caribbean or Dubai they aren’t booking with us because they don’t know we go to those destinations.
Hastings added: “Ocean Florida
is now in its 14th year so there’s a lot of equity in those consumers and reputation. They know we do Florida, and California; now they’ll know we also do the rest of the world.” Ox said the firm’s new offices
reflect Ocean Holidays’ guiding ethos as well as giving it the space to grow – a dedicated Winged Boots client consultation room has been built in the new two-floor HQ.
“Customers don’t book the Caribbean with us as they don’t know we sell it”
Office relocation
The office move was kept secret from staff until the day they were ready to move in last November when the directors asked them to come to work as normal but to a different address. “Treat your staff well and they
will look after your customers,” Ox said. “We wanted to surprise them and we watched as everyone walked in through the door. It was so satisfying to see their excitement. “Primarily we built the
offices for our staff, but you underestimate the external effect a new office can have. When suppliers visit us they realise we are not just a classic call centre. “We are trying to build a brand
and your office environment is one factor that really allows you to be engulfed by the brand. Plus we did it for ourselves because we are really enthusiastic about what we do.” Bright, open-plan and airy, the
offices have something of the ambience you’d expect Google and other modern tech firms to create for their staff. Themed offices and meeting
rooms, a breakout area and large canteen are designed to appeal to Ocean Holidays’ many young employees as well as the apprentices it brings in each year. They opened the same week
new mobile-friendly websites went live last year, an investment prompted by Google’s algorithm change to favour sites optimised for mobile. This was a first rebuild of
Ocean Holidays’ customer-facing technology for years, the firm having prioritised focusing on its back-end customer relationship management (CRM) platform. But driving its new integrated
multi-brand approach is continued investment in the latest CRM technology that allows firms to have a better understanding of what their clients are looking for. Ocean Holidays operates an online customer acquisition/ offline conversion model, so it is crucial that its websites drive calls to operatives who are primed to understand the customer and offer them what they want. It uses web optimisation tools supplied by Qubit, but 95% of its technology has been built in- house. This month it went live with Journey CRM, the third version of its technology that has been 12 months in development. The technology will look to
give website visitors personalised experiences based on a unique ID built up from all historical customer interactions. “We are all about customer
relationships,” Ox said. “And we are about to lift the lid of the customer data we have. It’s the perfect point to go to the next step, which is predictive analytics.”
17 August 2017
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