Introduction

Now that we have a season under our belt providing white label Customer Support for some Cloud Store partners, we thought you might find it helpful to hear about Snowbird’s experience using our support services to handle their customer’s Cloud Store inquiries and concerns. 

Snowbird is a world-class destination ski area only 24 miles from downtown Salt Lake City and only four miles up Little Cottonwood Canyon. Snowbird began using Liftopia’s Cloud Store e-commerce platform at the end of the 13-14 season. Since then sales have skyrocketed through the channel. With the increase in sales, Snowbird worked to find the best way to support customers, which is where Liftopia’s support team came in.

With launching an e-commerce platform, comes the necessity for customer support. Liftopia realized that building and operating a call center is capital and time intensive and isn’t always feasible for a ski area to add to its scope of operations.  In 16-17, Snowbird took advantage of a new product that Liftopia offered for the first time – white-label Cloud Store customer support. Liftopia’s well trained, in-house support team handled all of Snowbird’s Cloud Store phone & email inquiries on behalf of the resort. Liftopia agents fully understood Snowbird’s best practices and were able to seamlessly provide world-class support to Snowbird’s customers. Cloud Store customer support saved time, reduced costs, reduced customer waiting times, improved customer happiness, and increased phone sales for Snowbird.

How Cloud Store Customer Support Works

Liftopia worked directly with Snowbird in the early summer & fall to identify and proactively address the most common customer questions that would come up throughout the season. This open dialogue was critical in ensuring both Liftopia & Snowbird were on the same page and that Liftopia’s support team responded to questions quickly, correctly, and efficiently. Topics covered included adverse weather, limited terrain availability, missed flights, medical issues, and more. Liftopia’s customer support team has answered hundreds of thousands of customer inquiries and can provide valuable input for how to handle often challenging situations in addition to the existing resort support practices.

After these conversations with Snowbird, Snowbird replaced their “Contact Us” phone number and email address on order confirmations & Cloud Store with a unique-to-Snowbird phone number and email address that forwarded to Liftopia’s in-house support. Liftopia support agents were able to identify when Snowbird customers were calling and answered the phone as Snowbird support in a seamless process. Here are a few common challenges Snowbird faced and how Cloud Store customer support helped solve them.

Common Challenges Snowbird Faced & Resulting Solutions With Cloud Store Support

Challenge: During Little Cottonwood Canyon road closures, Snowbird was unable to handle the surge in customer contacts. Snowbird could not predict these events and as a result had much slower response times, leading to unhappy customers.

Solution & Result: Liftopia’s Cloud Store support answered 715 Snowbird customer phone calls with an average hold time of 56 seconds, responded to a total of 220 emails in under 1.5 hours on average, and had a Customer Satisfaction rating of over 80%. These metrics weren’t previously available but Simon Diggins, Director of Ski Tour & Travel Sales, said, “We never had a single complaint about slow or nonexistent email responses or long hold times. Our customers were very happy.”

Challenge: Phone sales to individuals or small groups were time-consuming and not the core focus for Snowbird’s group sales team. But, the responsibility fell to them, resulting in less time spent on selling to large groups.

Solution & Result: Liftopia support reps were able to efficiently close orders from individuals and smaller groups over the phone, resulting in over $90,000 in revenue, while Snowbird’s group sales team was able to focus on their core role.

Challenge: Set up and execute a world-class support system quickly and before the ski season was in full swing.

Solution & Result: Setting up Cloud Store customer support is a breeze and can be 100% implemented in under a week in an optimal scenario. Snowbird was fully launched in October, just in time for the ski season. Due to the ease of use of the system, this was not a problem. Simon Diggins said, “Cloud Store setup time was fast and efficient. It required minimal effort on our end and we were up and running in a few days.

Conclusion

Overall, Liftopia is able to scale its already existing customer support system to support your ski area in a very quick and effective way. Whether you have 5 employees or 500 employees, Liftopia can use its infrastructure to find a solution that will work for your resort. Simon at Snowbird summarized his experience with Cloud Store customer support as, “Overall, we were very happy with Liftopia’s Cloud Store white-label support and I would certainly recommend it to other resorts as a great alternative to doing in-house support.”

Pricing is dependent upon volume and other factors, and we are confident we can price our services in a way that will save you both money and time. If you are interested in learning more please contact Partners@liftopia.com. Thank you!