Part of the European travel leader DERTOUR Group, Apollo is among the Nordic region's leading tour operators planning, booking, and arranging vacation and business trips for more than one million travelers annually. Whether it’s a relaxing beach holiday or an exciting city stay, Apollo’s network of tour operators, hotel brands, destination agencies, and business travel experts pair unparalleled service with expert knowledge to land its customers the trips of their dreams.
“It is always our goal to provide our customers with the journey of a lifetime. Thanks to Dynamics 365, we can offer each customer personalized experiences with the details that matter most—and we can do it quickly, which is a win for our customers and our business.”
Glenn Bisgaard, Sales Director, Apollo
Landmarks along the way
Apollo’s digital maturity and customer focus are built on a solid foundation. For 17 years, the company has used Microsoft Dynamics CRM to manage its customer relationships, drive customer loyalty, and maintain a competitive advantage. What began as an initiative in 2016 to upgrade the company’s customer relationship management (CRM) system from on-premises to the cloud, has grown to leveraging omnichannel and customer insights to be a wellspring of customer experience innovation.
Offering a best-in-class customer experience means investing in the best CRM tools with touchpoints at every step in a customer’s journey, from inquiry to booking to arriving at a destination. But the company’s previous CRM system was fragmented, with siloed data that prevented a full, holistic understanding of Apollo’s number one stakeholder: the customer.
The company’s decision in 2016 to move from its on-premises CRM solution to the cloud was a turning point. Johnny Nilsson, Head of Group, Dynamics 365 Competence Center, Apollo realized that to be truly customer-centric, Apollo needed to move to the cloud with Dynamics 365 because “it isn’t one system or platform—it’s an ecosystem.” On the cloud, Apollo could continue its focus on innovating its customer service processes without the effort of system maintenance. The first step was replacing Salesforce Marketing Cloud with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, followed by the Digital Messaging Add-in for Dynamics 365 Customer Service to add a voice channel.
Apollo has been focused on using data to make the internal customer journey just as magical as the trips it plans for its customers. The power of the cloud and a consolidated data stream gave Apollo’s more than 500 employees the holistic, 360-degree view of customers needed to provide a seamless customer experience. Now, everyone with any touchpoint along a customer journey has the same view of the same data. Whether it’s an agent on the destinations end checking an app to find out which hotel shuttle bus a customer must board, a contact center agent using insights in a customer’s record to address a concern, or a manager analyzing strategic results in a Power BI dashboard, everyone in the company has the right tools to provide unparalleled customer service.
Smooth sailing
Apollo’s growth with Dynamics 365 has had a significant impact on both employees and customers. Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform together have eliminated the complexity of the previous system while consolidating and automating internal and customer-facing processes. The profound value to Apollo’s business is hard to quantify. "We cannot imagine how to operate without Power Platform and Dynamics 365. It is now part of our foundation, and the value cannot be monetarily calculated,” Nilsson said.
A key benefit of the move to a cloud-based CRM platform is the ability to target campaigns based on customer data flowing in from all interactions. And tailored, automated workflow triggers aligned with customers’ online behavior increased email clickthrough rates by a factor of five. Highly effective for customers, the targeted campaigns have significantly reduced the company’s marketing costs as well. Apollo is doing more with less by paying for fewer and more precise campaigns that have the right content sent at the right time to the right people. Microsoft Copilot for Service promises even more personalization of customer journeys with AI-powered insights. With 87% of Apollo’s sales happening online, the company looks forward to even more conversions and more revenue.
Apollo also enhanced its customers’ experiences by replacing its legacy customer feedback tool with Dynamics 365 Customer Voice. The legacy tool was expensive and difficult to work with. Now, employees can respond to customer events that require their attention in real time, thanks to the simplified automated workflow in Customer Voice. More customers are getting exactly what they need, as soon as they need it, and employees are enjoying a much more efficient workflow.
Taking off with Copilot
Apollo expanded its AI knowledge base to reduce support traffic with easy self-service options, allowing agents to focus on cases that needed their signature expertise. Routing frequently asked and recent questions through its first-generation chatbot cut support requests by nearly two-thirds in the Swedish market alone. “We’re a mass market business and we need to be able to answer the most common 20 questions from 95% bulk of business. Now we can build on the bot with PaaS [platform as a service] and generative AI to get our customers the information they need” explains Nilsson.
Now, building on the foundation of Power Virtual Agent, Copilot has ushered in a new generation multi-turn knowledge chatbot—built in Microsoft Copilot Studio and expected to respond to up to half of all customer queries in Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Danish, and Dutch with country-specific content and information from the web combined with customer insights. Customers will get tailored answers in seconds—including details as granular as a gate number, thanks to AI generative actions, making their trips even smoother. When cases need to be routed to a human, agents can use Copilot features in Dynamics 365 Customer Service to seamlessly continue the conversation with the customer.
Agents benefit, too. It’s difficult to focus on the customer when you have to simultaneously take notes and think about how to write the description required to open a case. And not all calls result in the creation of a case, putting the responsibility of follow-up solely on the agent. Now, Copilot generates a short summary of the call immediately, creating an automatic digital trail.
Yet another benefit is the time agents save. Copilot doesn’t eliminate just administrative tasks like note taking. It also does the heavy lifting quickly providing information agents typically spend a great deal of time searching for when responding to customers. And in Microsoft Teams, post-meeting summaries of action items and their owners provide the clarity that effective collaboration relies on. The time that’s saved can be reinvested in providing exceptional customer service.
“We cannot imagine how to operate without Power Platform and Dynamics 365. It is now part of our foundation, and the value cannot be monetarily calculated.”
Johnny Nilsson, Head of Group, Dynamics 365 Competence Center, Apollo
Next stops
Apollo has come a long way on its digital transformation journey, but this travel group always has its sights set on the next destination. Apollo sees a near future where customers are routed based on their early behavior to create an even more personalized experience. For instance, a customer who rated a sales representative 10 out of 10 in a satisfaction survey could be connected to the same agent the next time they call.
As the company continues to focus on customer satisfaction and loyalty, it looks forward to exploring new ways to use the data consolidated in Dynamics 365 with Copilot to provide even better information at the right time, faster, in more channels, and with more thorough follow-up. Afterall, Apollo has no shortage of data.
Customers count on Apollo to make their travel dreams come true and are excited to engage in planning and reviewing their experiences. Hundreds of thousands of comments are received each year and it’s only with generative AI that Apollo will glean actionable insights to drive marketing precision, hyper-personalized customer service, and growth. Dynamics 365 and Copilot will strengthen the human connections that make Apollo a leader in travel.
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