The Challenge
The Canadian Tourism Commission is a public-private sector partnership established to plan, direct, manage and implement programs to generate and promote tourism in Canada. The Canadian Tourism Commission is the official arm of the federal government’s working partnership between tourism industry businesses and associations, provincial and territorial governments and the Government of Canada.

The CTC wanted to create an integrated consumer marketing program in the United States consisting of DRTV, magazine, national newspapers, online (www.travelcanada.ca) and numerous special events.

In November of 2001, the Canadian Tourism Commission contracted TelePartners to create a contact centre program dedicated to providing oral and written information to potential American tourists, and to refer sales leads to American travel agents who are Canada Specialists. The CTC’s expectations included:

• Highly trained tourism agents.
• A web enabled CRM system.
• Instant delivery of email following each conversation.
• 48 hour delivery of literature to American prospects.
• Real-time campaign reporting delivered via a web interface.

The Solution
A team of call center agents were hired from the tourism industry and trained on the campaign specifics. Online learning tools were created to reinforce and supplement ongoing training.

TelePartners’ in-house programming team designed and hosted a web based CRM system so that all inquiries from the American public were logged into an online database. CTC management, ad agencies, and other interested third parties were given access to real-time campaign information so that decisions and adjustments could be made quickly.

An Internet based interface was created with DDS, CTC’s fulfillment partner so that literature requests could be transmitted and fulfilled the same day from fulfillment centres spread across the United States.

The Result
Our knowledgeable agents provided response services 7 days a week and collected further demographic information from each call for follow-up marketing.

Literature fulfillment was reduced from an average of five weeks to 48 hours.

Outgoing emails are drove subsequent visits to the Travel Canada website.

Reports and exports of collected data could be performed directly by the CTC and their partners via web-based tools, speeding up reaction time.

Because our database tracks the origin of the leads, we were able to send the provincial tourism organizations these leads, which in turn sent more destination-specific information out to the callers. This resulted in more effective results from the $40,000,000 advertising campaign directed at the U.S. market (Canada’s largest tourism pool).