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The Customer
Forest Holidays offer idyllic woodland holidays in ten, breathtaking UK locations. They connect people, nature and local communities.
The holidays offer peace and tranquillity for families, couples and groups. Guests can stay in luxurious cabins and take part in adventurous outdoor pursuits or just have a wonderful break, relaxing in the lovely, scenic countryside.
The company website is used to market and provide useful information to customers and is the platform through which most holidays are booked. Forest Holidays’ central head office is located in Moira.
“We no longer have to think about our website infrastructure. Isn’t that what outsourcing is all about?”
The Challenge
The company required a managed services provider to optimise customer engagement, customer service and generate further revenue. The previous supplier didn’t have a solution that suited Forest Holidays size and business model, and this caused Forest Holidays several operational issues. Their package was for much smaller businesses and they didn’t have the next step up that Forest Holidays was looking for.
IT Systems Manager, Nick Danson said: “We needed to change the configuration. The model wasn’t working for our requirements and was taking significant resources to manage, which is not the goal of outsourcing. Like Node4, our number one priority is customer service and we wanted to be able to concentrate solely on that. That’s what Node4 delivers.”
The website is fundamental to the business model as it allows customers to book and organise their trip any time of day or night. It’s imperative, therefore, that it is 100% reliable to allow business to boom.
The Solution
Node4 was the perfect provider to move to. Node4 has already delivered robust support, flexibility, scalability and significant and measurable ROI to Forest Holidays.
Services that have already been implemented include:
- A private cloud platform
- Database software
- Web services (customer-facing website and booking portal)
- Hosting
- Resilient internet bandwidth
- DDoS, data security management and disaster recovery, hosted in Node4’s flagship data centre.
With such a large portfolio of complementary solutions, Node4 can provide more products and services as and when Forest Holidays require them.
“I joined Forest Holidays halfway through the project, but Node4’s management was so seamless, it didn’t matter. All the information was available, all my questions were answered quickly, and I was up to speed in no time,” Nick continued.
The Benefits
“The move to Node4 took just minutes at a quiet time of day. Those not working in the IT team didn’t even realise it had happened. It can’t get better than that,” said Nick
The business website is now 100% reliable and cabin occupancy is up to 97%, compared to last year’s figures for the same months. This makes it easy for customers to book far ahead of time which they often want to do. New sites are booked up before they are even fully completed, but because the website works so well now, the telephone team are still far less busy as most bookings are done online. This frees the team up to spend more time with customers, who can’t book online, and means that there are no problems at peak times.
Staff can now concentrate on their core jobs instead of juggling calls about IT problems, so staff and customers are happy and relaxed, and everything is running as it should.
Forest Holidays are confident that they now have a provider in place which can deal with any eventuality to manage the business’s IT functions.
Head of Digital and IT, Ben Lang said: “We are eternally grateful that Node4 web hosting has given us no issues. We just wish all providers were the same.”
“Our job is to enable Forest Holidays to grow. Part of that is due diligence when finding suppliers. Was Node4 able to offer what we needed at the right cost? Yes. They are absolutely the right fit,” Ben adds.
The Feedback
“Working with Node4 means that we can concentrate all of our skills and strengths on being a leading, luxury, forest holiday provider. We can now spend our time working out how to add those extra touches to our service which really make the customer’s holiday rather than worrying about IT. That’s what outsourcing should be about.
Node4 are so clearly specialists in what they do. It fills me with confidence that they can talk knowledgeably about our challenges and their solutions. They always have someone on hand to answer my in-depth technical questions and they are so honest about everything. We couldn’t be happier with the partnership.”
Nick Danson, IT Systems Manager, Forest Holidays.
IMPROVE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN THE HOSPITALITY AND TOURISM INDUSTRY WITH NODE4
If you are looking to upgrade information technology in the hospitality and tourism industry, our work with Forest Holidays is an excellent example of what we can provide with digital business transformation.
As a top managed service provider in the UK, we provide a range of services and solutions that can help your business run more efficiently and provide clearly visible results.
By modernising your business and providing your customers with an excellent user experience, you can increase your customer engagement and in turn your revenue, as Forest Holidays has done to great success.
If you are interested in boosting your online services to their full potential, get in touch with one of our specialists today. We will be happy to discuss how our digital transformation service and a range of other improvements can enhance your business.
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