The Personal Travel Agents at Co-operative Travel
Midcounties Co-operative is the second-largest independent co-operative in the UK, and The Personal Travel Agents at Co-operative Travel is made up of individual travel specialists who use their knowledge and insight to create unique holidays for each customer.
Creation of a new ‘umbrella’ website for The Personal Travel Agents now allows their 160-plus self-employed personal travel agents (PTAs) to create and send their own targeted, personalised mailings to their customer lists.
All 160-plus sites are integrated with the main website The Personal Travel Agents, which means that functions can be carried out centrally from the site, with complete consistency. Most significantly, the PTAs have the ability to personalise e-shots, following the common core content sent to them by HQ. The personalisation of offers to their own client listings, and the better streamlining and presentation of information has directly resulted in increased sales, which are said to be, “not just up, or even double, but significantly up”.
“This is a great example of how website integration can produce transformation results for an organisation. Not only are sales increased but the whole operation is more efficient, accountable and compliant. Better control, better future-proofed and better managed.”
Shaun Wilders, Managing Director Cultrix Digital
Admin staff now select key information to auto-build the email in a process that takes just seconds; previously undertaking this as a manual process for each of the 160-plus PTAs. Using the same e-shot system Cultrix Digital created, PTAs can then tailor each e-shot to their own sale style. The whole e-shot system has the ability to be personalised and automated to over 85,000 contacts across over 160 varied, targeted lists.
Further cost-saving efficiencies have been made by the automation of other admin-heavy functions. Management of holiday adverts is now taken care of centrally, with expired ads now automatically removed from the site/s. Similarly, the training administration of the entire PTA workforce is now also automated. Via a content management system (CMS), training is logged and monitored to ensure minimum training requirements and relevant conference attendances are met.
As part of the custom-build integration, Cultrix Digital have also built an additional website for the purposes of recruiting new PTAs. The recruitment site feeds into the main system, with application forms received rejected or approved according to the CMS, and the whole process logged.
All pages for all of the websites have SEO tools built in to ensure that every page meets current best practice and all functions can be controlled and moderated centrally.