How to Turn Customer Support Into a Sale? – The Omnichannel Way

I recently stayed at a beach resort, booking through an aggregator that promised 24-hour check-in/check-out. But when I arrived at 9:30 am, I was told check-in was at 2 pm. After showing my booking confirmation, the hotel agreed to look into it and asked us to tour the property in the meantime.

During the tour, we loved a section with beach and pool views and asked about upgrading to one of those rooms. That’s when the trouble started. The upgraded room cost ₹5,500 more for two nights.

I contacted the aggregator to explore a lower upgrade cost, but they said I’d need to cancel my booking incurring a cancellation fee and rebook at a new rate, costing me ₹6,300 more in total.

Despite explaining that I only wanted an upgrade, not a cancellation, the support agent couldn’t help. So, I paid the hotel directly for the upgrade.

Thankfully, the stay was amazing. But as someone in the customer experience space, the situation made me reflect and I ended up writing a detailed email to both the hotel and aggregator about how an omnichannel experience could’ve streamlined the whole process.

How Would Omnichannel Help Here?

Ideally, the hotel and the aggregator should be tightly integrated on the availability of rooms, facilities, and discounts.

Imagine the situation where I make the booking, and the aggregator provides me:

• An option to upgrade to a higher-grade room
• A chance to change my booking to some other date
• And an opportunity to look at additional services I can avail myself of during my stay.

This gives additional revenue options for the aggregator besides the hotel getting commitment on the usage of services in advance.

With these options, there would have been no need for me to call up customer support, and I could have done this on the portal itself.

The hotel should also regularly communicate the offers they are willing to throw their guests, based on the availability of facilities and services.

You can also check our article on: How Do You Measure & Improve Customer Retention

Show Me to Impress

How about adding photographs and videos of the accommodation available and the views from inside the rooms? This would have made me probably switch to the room I eventually chose to stay in.

How Does It End up in a Sale?

As an aggregator, if they had access to upgrades and the hotel’s last-minute discounts, they would have converted my existing sale to a large value sale.

Besides, imagine the aggregator throws me a coupon in addition to the upgrade. Then, I will be their repeat customer, most likely for the long run.

Be Channel-Agnostic

As an aggregator or hotel, if your customer reaches out on , they don’t expect a human agent at first. Still, they’ll expect a human-like response along with seamless transitions to agents who would be able to address complex issues like what is listed here.

Mine the Data

As a business, you must mine every piece of customer data – past purchases, preferences, buying patterns, and cadence. This would help you send relevant offers to your customers, who are most likely to find them personalized to their liking.

Serving today’s customers isn’t easy, and moving from support to sale is even more challenging. Customers expect customer support to understand their problems and solve them quickly. So, when they get sold, it will not be easy.

The sale has to be seamless and should be part of the process of helping the customers solve their problems.