All News
Working together to win: Zolv and Sunvil
9/23/2013 12:00:00 AM
Zolv and Sunvil working together
“Zolv offer the ultimate in flexibility – nothing is too much trouble.”
- Alexis Jospehides, Product Development Manager, Sunvil
Sunvil is an independent tour operator that's been steadily growing for
over 40 years, initially specialising in Cyprus and Greece. The
portfolio now includes holidays in the Azores, Venice, Romania, Sweden
and Sicily. Sunvil also offers bespoke, off-the-beaten-track holidays in
its Latin America Traveller programme, which has been running since
1995.
With its great reputation for exceeding customers' expectations and
growing customer base, Sunvil needed to present an engaging, credible
and reliable web site – one that wins sales opportunities, improves
sales values and helps direct business development.
Challenge
Sunvil saw three key challenges in their online business:
- incomplete offering: most of the company's products could not be booked online
- unknown customers: Sunvil couldn't identify customers' interests and target them with tailored marketing
- tired branding: the look and feel of the site no longer represented Sunvil's diverse portfolio
The company had created a wealth of multimedia content that it wanted to
keep, together with the good search engine rankings the site had
garnered. Any new solution would need to protect these assets while
offering do-it-yourself content management.
It looked as if Sunvil was asking for the impossible: an out-of-the-box solution with tailored quality. Enter Zolv.
Solution
Alexis Josephides, Sunvil’s Product Development Manager, met Zolv at an
exhibition. “They were familiar with Comtec’s Travelink and their WTP
platform looked like a good fit for most of our requirements, but not
all of them,” he says. “When we met and expressed our concerns, their
can-do attitude and enthusiasm to make it work for us immediately
reassured us that we could work with them.”
Zolv developed a new search and book engine, built on top of Travelink.
This involved working with a series of inhouse customisations, including
routines for creating special offers, and presenting them on the new
site. The result is that all of Sunvil's products are fully bookable on
the site – and always will be.
Zolv met Sunvil's need for better customer insight by configuring the
site to update Saleforce with relevant customer events. This means that
touchpoints like brochure orders, queries and feedback are captured
along with orders. The Sunvil team now have a full picture of each
customer's interaction with the company as well as the aggregate data
they need to feed in to business development.
On the branding side, Zolv streamlined the site redesign by working
directly with Sunvil's creative agency. Alexis explains: “We knew Zolv
had a great design team but we had already asked our marketing company
to help us rebrand. Zolv were more than happy to work with our agency so
we stepped back and let Zolv liaise directly, not wanting to be the
messenger between them. It worked incredibly well, saving us time and
money whilst maximising creativity.”
Working together
Sunvil and Zolv have different skills, but they share a common
vision: to find the best combination of standard and special features
for their customers' needs. Sunvil does it with travel, Zolv with
software. A passion for understanding people is close to the heart of
both teams. Alexis says: “The relationship with Zolv was crucial.
Unexpected requirements and change are inevitable at every level but
Zolv just kept adding functionality and adapted to changes we’d not
envisaged. The development of our site, like our company, is never
finished so it’s crucial that we have an ongoing, healthy and productive
relationship with Zolv – and we do!”
