Lapland Hotels: quality & collaboration with Documill

Digitalization – for the sake of human experience 

“For a business even as conventional as travel and hospitality, digitalization plays a big role these days. The last couple of years have kept us busy in this area”, says Thumas Miilumäki, Head of Sales Service & CRM at Lapland Hotels & Safaris. 

Part of it is development, another is harmonization. When a new property is acquired – like the Haikko Manor in Porvoo a couple of years ago – there tend to be ICT solutions that need to be removed as redundant. Others may need to be made to work with what already exists. Modernization adds another dimension to the maintenance and development. 

An important part of this is and has been customer relationship management – especially for key accounts – in Lapland Hotels’ long-standing CRM, Salesforce. 

“A common wish across our teams is, ‘could this be done with just a click of a button and leave the manual work to the machine?’” 

It’s about adding speed to the processes, but equally much about adding ease, transparency, and value to the customer.

Hotel Sirkantähti, Levi, Finland (Photo: Jani Kärppä / Kota Kollektiivi)

Salesforce users rely on Documill 

“Documill is a key part of our Salesforce. We now use it to produce well-defined, standardized concentration and frame agreements with our key B2B customers.” 

“The overriding benefit from Documill, for us, is the quality of the documents and the data in them. The contracts come with zero errors.”  

But it doesn’t hurt either that a lot of time is saved. Now the whole contract process takes place right within Salesforce, with a click of a button.  

“When a human creates a document, there is always a typo or two sneaking in somewhere. At worst, a sales rep might have used three days to get a contract right, only to find that all the good work had been undermined by forgetting to upgrade to that new, beautiful template by the marketing team.” 

Also, the special conditions in a contract might have been edited too freely. In the big picture, this resulted in a slightly too varying base of contracts and the terms and conditions granted to different customers. Yet, Documill leaves just enough space to customize the contracts – for both the sales reps and customers. 

As one sales rep said, “Now I don’t need to worry about minutes and seconds with a stopwatch in my hand. I have learned to trust that technology can do the job better and faster than I ever could with our old manual practice, although that worked well for us.” 

“We have a decentralized organization in one of the biggest European countries by area. Although an email will travel all the way through in the blink of an eye, getting the communication right and clear to our customers, too, is paramount”, says  Thumas. 

“Also, the number of emails sent in the process has dropped considerably. Yet more time saved.” 

Future: more contracts – and other documents… 

Lapland Hotels is now looking to use Documill also for some other types of contracts. 

“In fact, we are all the time, like, moving forward in a train of development. It will be exciting to see what kinds of use cases we’ll identify this forthcoming year.” 

“Good ideas always find their way to our development. And that is not just us, but also our partners like Documill – and possible proven use cases from their other customers they can bring to the table. It’s good to get support from trusted partners who know their business – and their customers’.” 

Expanding the languages from the currently used Finnish is in the pipeline. 

“We are now adding English versions to our existing templates and layout. And our international sales are targeting many regions in their own language. Why not automate some documents in, say, French or German? Maybe not legal documents like contracts, but price catalogs and such?” 

“If we can do it credibly for native speakers in their own language, we can delight them with yet a new improvement to our service.”

Fancy a dinner in the ice palace of the Snow Village? (Photo: Tomi Kurtakko)

Key benefits: quality and accuracy 

“To us, the key benefit in document automation is high quality. That includes the quality of the documents and the data in them. And I have to say, there hasn’t been much fuss in passing on the Salesforce data to the documents. “ 

That’s down to having had everything configured agilely from the start by Loikka Solutions, a Salesforce integrator, and  Documill professionals. The effort needed has been surprisingly low. 

“We had the data in the CRM sufficiently clean already. Then, it’s now easy to replicate in documents without errors. There hasn’t been a need to track any errors, quite frankly. 

“Also, the visual quality of the documents and the user experience of the system have garnered praise from our customers. Take the integrated e-signatures: for certain customers, they may be extremely important.” 

In general, the lead times have been significantly reduced, and the data gets automatically archived in the right place in the CRM, where everybody can work simultaneously. 

“But it’s also down to our quest for data discipline. We have made firm decisions about which data to keep clean and up to date – and with which not to bother, so it can go as incoherent.” 

All ICT users have accepted the fact that what they do must be done with quality. They follow the practices agreed and taught.  

“There isn’t room for soloing with the data in those procedures set.”