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User Stories: Kulaniapia Falls. Improve lead qualification and close rate by 5x with an interactive cost calculator

Kulaniapia falls story

Challenge: How to convey your pricing clearly to set the right customer expectations of your services?

Solution: Give customers a better idea of what our experience costs with interactive cost caculator, and route the right inquiry to an appropriate manager for followup.

Result: Leads that submit a calculator/quote close at about 5x the rate of simple inquiries!

If you ever dreamed of a getaway to an exotic and inspiring destination, you have probably thought about Hawaii at least once in your life.

Now try to imagine it from a business perspective. Providing everything hosts need to create powerful shared experiences that guests will remember for a lifetime: inspiring accommodation, authentic dining, adventures, guides and etc. Planning it is much more complicated than just picking a few rooms, and activities. Then think how much harder it can be if you’re planning an experience for 20, 30, or more people!

Today we’ll introduce you to a dreamy, yet a challenging place - Kulaniapia Falls

Hawaii’s most inspiring, authentic and sustainable destination.

Background and challenges

Kulaniapia Falls is the largest privately accessible waterfall in the state of Hawaii, offering unique guest rooms, off-grid cabins, miles of nature trails, and a fully functioning farm, as well as activities like waterfall rappelling, lava tube exploration, and cooking classes.

Combining accommodations, adventure activities and farm-to-table food experiences, Kulaniapia Falls is a unique destination for weddings, family reunions, traveling with friends, and retreats. At the moment Kulaniapia Falls is in the process of shifting more of their business to groups and events, each of which is customized to the needs of each host.

With so much to offer, they get a lot of inquiries, so it takes a lot to evaluate what goes into and the cost of creating the most powerful shared experiences.

While getting many inquiries can be a blessing, it can also be a curse if they are not properly qualified, taking a lot of time from managers who also need to run the business.

We would often spend 15-30 minutes describing our offering to a potential customer, only to learn it was out of their price range.

Jasmine Hetfeld, Groups and Events Manager at Kulaniapia Falls

As a business that offers a complex, experience focused offering, it’s crucial they only spend their limited time talking to the most qualified customer prospects.

How to know which client is serious and realistic? How to set the right expectations?

Once you ask yourself the right questions, you find the answers that make a difference.

Extraordinary solutions - interactive caclulators

Explaining the way such business price groups is more complex than just buying all of the rooms. The rate is a function of the property option, group size, food and activity options, etc.

Jasmine Hetfeld, Groups and Events Manager at Kulaniapia Falls

We started using Calconic when we created a new section of our website, specifically focused on groups and events, and wanted to make “how much groups cost” easier to understand.

Jasmine Hetfeld, Groups and Events Manager at Kulaniapia Falls

Also, there are many things the customer doesn’t care about (property cost, per person service charges, food budgets, activities, taxes), but with hidden fields, you can count everything you need in one place and provide only a simple output for the customer in terms of what they do care about (deposit, payment schedule, and per-person cost).

Calconic offered a good balance of simplicity, and flexibility for more complex calculations.

Jasmine Hetfeld, Groups and Events Manager at Kulaniapia Falls

Interactive calculators created with Calconic allows sales managers and potential customers to quote the cost of an experience, which is based on several factors such as season, property option, number of guests, food and activity options, etc. It was necessary to enable more people on the team to provide quotes and to allow customers to qualify themselves before getting in touch with Kulaniapia Falls sales team.

Kulaniapia Falls created two interactive calculators that would bring them closer to their true potential clients.

One for Hosts, that pay all of the costs of the group themselves, and another for Cohosts, where they only make a small deposit.

Creating a calculator allows clients to get a better idea of what our experience costs, and route that inquiry to an appropriate manager for followup.

Jasmine Hetfeld, Groups and Events Manager at Kulaniapia Falls

Results and Creativity that works

The results speak for themselves. Leads that submit a calculator/quote close at about 5x the rate of simple inquiries. These customers have spent more time thinking about the experience, and know what it costs, so they tend to take much less time to close.

Further on, if you are new to the market and necessarily learning some things as you go, “using a calculator allows management to change how it’s priced and positioned without retraining all of the front office staff on something that is changing, and really should be handled by a manager.” says Groups and Events Manager at Kulaniapia Falls Jasmine Hetfeld

Each web calculator is unique for the individual case. WHY? Because it is customized to solve different personalized problems. And CALCONIC_ team is always here to help you implement your custom solutions.

What’s special about interactive calculators for Kulaniapia Falls? They function not only as calculators but route the results to many other business systems.

Unique features:

Conclusion

Looking deeper than the surface of web calculators, they can do so much more than just count the numbers. It may be an answer to all major customer questions. It can also be the tool to direct you to your highest value potential customers to the best sales resources and that’s only a few of the benefits they can bring.

Gintė @calconic: I hope you liked Jasmine's story. Please, leave a comment below if you want to showcase your calculator and story! Cheers.

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