Introduction to Särkänniemi

Tampere’s Särkänniemiis a tourism company owned by the City of Tampere, established in 1966. Särkänniemi is a platform for joy and experiences, Finland’s most versatile travel destination, and the biggest attraction in Tampere’s tourism scene. The Särkänniemi experience currently includes an amusement park, an aquarium, the Näsinneula observation tower, a planetarium, Koiramäki Animal Farm, and one of Finland’s top restaurants, Restaurant Näsinneula.

We sat down with Heikki Ihanamäki, the HR and Marketing Director of Särkänniemi, to discuss his experience as a Leadoo partner after the first full year of collaboration. These are his words:

How Customer Experience Has Exceeded High Expectations

Collaboration with Leadoo AI began in early 2024. From the start, the cooperation has been smooth and effortless. The process has been clear, structured, and professional, which has also made the entire Särkänniemi team’s role in this partnership easier.

Initially, we thought that using Leadoo would require a lot of time and resources, despite the emphasis during the sales process on efficiency and allowing the customer to truly enjoy being in the customer’s position. However, it has been a pleasure to see that everything was made incredibly easy for us during the structured onboarding process – and this ease has continued in our daily operations.

We started designing solutions by utilizing Leadoo’s traditional conversion tools (InpageBot, ChatBot, VisualBot), and in the next phase, we will implement the AI-powered Leadoo AI tools.

Reducing the Customer Service Team’s Workload and Enhancing Online Customer Experience

At first, we implemented Leadoo to improve customer service and customer experience. Our goal was to reduce the workload of our customer service team and enhance the customer experience on our website.

With Leadoo, questions from the website are now better structured, and the need for follow-up inquiries has significantly decreased. This has directly reduced our customer service workload and improved operational efficiency.

As originally planned, we have now also expanded the use of Leadoo to support our B2B sales – specifically for lead generation and qualification. This process is still ongoing, but we are excited to see the results.

The Results Have Been Outstanding

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) topics placed a significant strain on our customer service team. While the information was available on our website, people couldn’t find it easily – and calling or emailing felt like the most natural way for them to resolve their issues. We were not fully succeeding in helping our customers help themselves online.

Since launching our partnership with Leadoo, over 250,000 people have interacted with our customer service tools regarding topics such as rides, ticketing, arrival, and parking.

During the amusement park season, over 25,000 visitors initiated a customer service dialogue with the tool, and only 70 of them – just 0.3% – felt they did not receive a resolution and requested further contact from our customer service team.

As another example, in our online store, around 75,000 visitors used the customer service tool last season, with 10,500 initiating a conversation. Of those who started a conversation, only about 1.2% were redirected to our customer service team. The remaining 98.8% of visitor inquiries were handled in a consistent and automated manner.

From an operational perspective, this is an incredible efficiency ratio.

Who are Exceptional Villas?

Exceptional Villas are a luxury travel company, renting more than 3000 high-end villas for short stays all over the world. 

As their name suggests, their USP centres on creating one-of-a-kind holiday experiences for clients. Yet that starts well before the holiday, with a bespoke and personalised sales process. Something they are increasingly building into their website experience with Leadoo.

We sat down with General Manager at Exceptional Villas, Linda Browne, and her Conversion Experts at Leadoo AI, to examine how that shift is improving UX and site performance, and delivering notable ROI within the first year of being implemented.

The Need for Conversational Tech

Exceptional Villas sell knowledge and quality when planning high-end holidays. When you book a villa through them, you deal with a sales consultant who specialises in your chosen destination for example. 

So for Linda, echoing that expertise and bespokeness onsite was a must. Conversational experiences are an effective way of doing this, but the tech needs to be right. As Linda recalls:

“I was approached by many conversational marketing companies and we never really found a suitable fit. A lot of them were just livechat options. But because our focus is on high-end luxury travel, I always knew our clients expect us to have really in-depth knowledge of our destinations, and create personalised experiences for them.”

“So we needed to partner with a company who could offer us that really customised solution. And give our onsite users the kind of personalised experience that our sales team do – even if they are just browsing.”

Exceptional Villas have been able to customise Leadoo AI’s conversational tech to create bots that let users do everything from working out their perfect destination, to checking availability of certain villas, to submitting enquiries on holidays they’ve already booked.”

Personalisation Boosting the Sales Process

Linda and the team found that extending these personalised experiences onsite is not only improves UX and conversion rates, but also Exceptional Villas’ entire sales process: 

“What we love about Leadoo is that it makes it easier for people to engage with us while they’re on the site. Previously we only had a contact us button which went to a static form to enquire about a villa. There was never an option to just ask a quick question while researching.” 

“Also, when someone makes an enquiry through the Leadoo bots now, the backend logic directs them to the most relevant salesperson. So they know who they’ll be speaking to while still on the site. That salesperson is then with them for the rest of their journey with us.”

Delivering Exceptional ROI

The results of making website browsing and enquiries more interactive have been profound. In the first 7 months of having Leadoo’s conversational bots onsite, they have been directly responsible for €209,000 in revenue from holiday bookings.

We know that because Conversion Journey insights maps lifetime journeys of individual site users. Which is important for Exceptional Villas because as Linda explains:

“As a luxury travel brand, the journey our customers go through is not just – ‘I’m going to come on the website and book that luxury property today.’ It’s quite a long and research-intense buying journey. On average it is about 2-3 weeks even if they have destinations in mind.”

Even with these intensive sales cycles, the €209,000 in directly attributable Leadoo bot bookings represents a 24x return on the investment into Leadoo over the first 7 months of being live. Even when factoring the marketing cost of Leadoo for an entire year, it represents a 15x return already. 

Leadoo Syncing With Salesforce

ROI can be tracked instantly because of Leadoo’s two-way integration with Salesforce – the CRM that Exceptional Villas use. As Linda explains:

“Every lead that Leadoo generates goes straight into Salesforce and is assigned to the most relevant or knowledgeable person about that specific destination or villa. So our integration via Leadoo has been extremely helpful from a business perspective.”
“Leadoo is also giving our sales team insights into the pages users are browsing – which is invaluable.

We have over 3000 villas available. So the choice is almost endless for people. But being able to see exactly which villas people have looked at before we have that initial consultation with our sales team allows us to deliver the bespoke holiday experiences our customers rightly expect.”

What’s Next on the Conversion Front?

Exceptional Villas are looking to arm their sales team with even more insights by trialling sales alerts. Which will alert salespeople when prospects that they own in the CRM system return to or visit certain pages on the website.

They are also looking to simply utilise more Leadoo bots. Below you can see a video of a relatively new visual bot in action. Being used right at the top of the marketing funnel – on a high traffic but relatively low intent blog.

As Linda explains, “the New York to the Caribbean blog has always gotten loads of traffic because it ranks so well in Google. But before Leadoo, we never once had a direct enquiry from it. On Sofia’s recommendation we added the visual bot to it, and in the short time since then, we’ve already generated 4 sales enquiries from it – which is potentially worth tens of thousands in new revenue for us.”