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Get started[Editor’s Note: A version of this story originally appeared on the PieSync blog]
Swiss hotel technology leader, Tourisoft, has spent the past 15 years finding innovative ways to help hoteliers gain more visibility and control over their operations. Its flagship platform, Hotel-Spider, support this goal by synchronizing data from various booking sites to provide up-to-the-second insights on room availability.
A whole different set of technologies are required behind-the-scenes, however, to keep the company in position to be the personal, professional solution it hopes to be.
Inside the Hotel-Spider Software Stack
Elisha Schoppig, Operations Manager at Tourisoft, estimates that 90% of the company’s phone conversations occur via Aircall.
“We’ve been using Aircall for about a year now after searching for something cloud-based that we could use and scale anywhere,” Schoppig explained. “The only option with these characteristics available in Switzerland was Aircall. It offers a lot of flexibility.”
And then, giving context to many of these conversations, there’s Zoho CRM.
“Basically anyone who has been in contact with us either as a lead or as a subscriber exists in Zoho,” Schoppig added.
Email marketing communications, whether for educating leads or updating clients, are handled via MailChimp. And then finally, to maintain top-of-the-line service, Hotel-Spider uses Zendesk’s ticketing features to rapidly respond to their clients’ support requests.
Today, this toolset gives Hotel-Spider all it needs to effectively communicate with clients’ throughout their buying journeys. But getting this ideal arrangement in place was not an easy task.
Islands of Isolated Data
Schoppig and his team appreciate the importance of segmenting communications. Different audiences naturally need and expect different things. But that kind of personalization requires, first and foremost, accurate contact data.
One simple but significant hurdle for Hotel-Spider was transferring Zoho CRM contacts, leads, and language preferences over to MailChimp.
And that’s where PieSync saved the day.
“We are constantly getting new leads and contacts in Zoho CRM,” Schoppig noted. “Before PieSync, every two weeks I used to manually import/export lists from Zoho into MailChimp. The result was an hour of work and 80% of the time there were mistakes.”
And at that point, the planned addition of Aircall was still a source of anxiety.
“Though Zoho and Aircall have a native integration, you can only see the calls on Zoho’s platforms, not the other way around,” Schoppig explained. “For us, it’s very important to see who is calling directly on our phones, wherever we are.”
He initially tried to create a workaround using a one-way sync tool, but once again discovered that only PieSync fit the requirements for an ideal solution.
Smooth, Connected Communications
Now the relationships between Hotel-Spider’s key tools are smoother than ever. When a lead coming from its website is created in Zoho, PieSync will automatically add it to the correct list in MailChimp. The same happens with contacts (current subscribers). Although they can come from many different sources, their contact data will reliably be synced into MailChimp once it is gathered in Zoho.
At the same time, the integration between Aircall and Zoho CRM via PieSync gives the team access to quality contact information from any device.
“Thanks to PieSync I know exactly who is calling, no matter where I am or the device where I’m taking the call — same for my colleagues to whom I refer a call to,” Schoppig added. “That’s a big advantage PieSync offers us from a sales point of view.”
Another significant benefit of using PieSync is the possibility to map custom fields between Zendesk and Zoho CRM. Context such as account IDs and salutations (Miss, Mister, Madame, etc.) can automatically be turned into powerful macros in Zendesk.
“We went from no integration and data silos to having synchronized data across our business.”
Published on March 14, 2019.
