I work as a sales person in a safari company. There is four people in our sales and customer service team: Our team leader who is sales and operations manager, me and another person deal most of the on-going sales and a guide’s manager who also deal with some walk-in customers. We offer different kind of safaris for tourists mostly during winter but also summer time. We also rent snowshoes and basic beginners cross country skis. Our safari house location is in Ruka, Kuusamo. We offer example snowmobiling, snowshoeing and husky tours.
Out of the peak seasons my job is mostly remote sales directly to customers but also tour operators abroad and locally. The busy season for us is from start of December (when there is enough snow for activities) to start of January and from start of February to end of March. During that time my work is a larger range of stuff. I of course do the sales as usual remotely by email and phone, confirm online bookings, deal with walk-in customers and handle customer service locally in our safari house, on top off all this I help guides, arrange different transfers, handle some transfers, keep our safari house in order, book different providers, deal with customer feedback etc. And if that is not enough, I also do some guidance.
Social media and different ePlatforms is huge part of almost everyone’s work and life nowadays. In our work at the moment, we use quite common ones for service industry: Facebook, Instragram, TikTok and WhatsApp. The first three are used mostly promoting our sales. In the first two we share basically the same stuff informative videos and pictures of our activities and other operations and share customers stories from our safaris while in TikTok we share more short videos to capture the user’s interest. I don’t use them personally at work yet but for the following season I am going to take part of that as well. We use WhatsApp we as a communication tool inside our team, with guides and also sometimes with customers. WhatsApp is also great way to share possible photos for customers from their tour.
Work wisely the use of social media is a huge benefit. With good material we can influence or even manipulate people to want things. With good material you get more likes and visibility and then probably more sales or at least your company name has now reached more people. For consumers there is of course the down side of being the one who is influenced. Example with pictures, stories, videos and music the idea is to capture the customers interest and then sell them the idea that they want and need that. But that is the key point of advertising and always have been. The difference for other media sources are that here the customer can socialize and interact not only with the company but other customers as well. Company wisely that also means that customers or someone who pretends to be customer can easier talk bad about the company for everybody to hear about it.
All in all, social media is tricky topic. There is really useful side of it but also harmful side. In my opinion the harmful side is more concerning for the individual user. Social media can be addicting as it releases dopamine, feel of pleasure easily. But the impact of that is short where dopamine realized from example reading a book is more long term and better for humans. And from company point of view this dopamine rush seekers are just scrolling through the videos and it is a hard task to capture the interest of the consumer as it has to be done in couple of seconds. Too slow or uninteresting video or photo will not do that.
Less stressful, more organized future
While social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook are good tools for advertising to share more informative stuff they have lost their power. Most of the people use these platforms for scrolling and to gain dopamine rush. People who are interested of more specific information usually use YouTube as you can better search a specific thing from it. For that reason, I think use of YouTube could be a good ad for our company. We could share videos showing what happens in our specific tours example summary of our ice karting activity. I saw a similar one from another company and I think it gives way better explanation of the activity than the written text. This would be easy to share with a possible customer as well and support our sales.
While doing this course first assignment about the digi society I was already thinking that I could use ChatGBT as a tool for my work. ChatGBT is platform based on artificial intelligent. It searches information for you from internet like different websites. We get lot of new questions and request from our customers every year. For huge part of them I don’t have direct answer form them. They may be asking something simple like from what restaurant I can get specific food something really specific can be arrange for them. And of course, my job is to please the customers and answer their questions with best knowledge I have in my hands. The ChatGBT could be a very good tool for me to find the answers quicker.
Another tool I will definitely use in future is DeepL. We deal with lot of customers abroad. And even when we use English as our main communication language inside and outside of our company it may not be enough. There are customers whose English is not that good and sometimes there is a huge language barrier because of it. I already use lot of google translator as I get lot of request example in French or Italian. But with DeepL I can translate a whole pdf if needed. DeepL can also be used to help me to upgrade my writing skills. Sometimes Ï see that my writing is a bit stiff when I write in English. With DeepL I can get help with that as it offers me different ways of saying the same thing.
As our operation is mostly focus on winter most of our guides are working only seasonally. And logically not all guides come back the next season as they may have found something else to do while the safaris are not running. Also, our sales grow now every year so we need more guides every year. Therefore, every year we are hiring new guides. It is not an easy task to find suitable guides and I think we should use more professional tools for searching the valid people for the job. LinkedIn could be a proper tool for that. It’s a business and employment-focused social media platform. It is a place where workers and companies can connect. Companies can example publish job postings there and a workers can advertise their self when looking for job. I see this as a great way to search for valid workers and saw other companies in same industry and area doing it already. You can see this add below.
Lastly, I think Todoist could be a good ad to support our team’s work. As a team we have specific tasks do to every day during high season. We haven’t specified who does what as they have to be done every day and we work in shifts and beside these everyday tasks we have the urgent work on spot as well. So basically, the who ever have time, does these tasks. Sometimes we see that two persons are doing the same stuff at the same time or at the end of the day or worst-case scenario the next day we realize nobody has done that. At Todoist we can keep one list of this task together in one place and everybody can see what is done and what is not done. There can be daily list or some longer projects. We can have list as a team and also personal lists.
In conclusion, I can see that different ePlatforms can be either good tool to support and help my everyday work and make communication and overall team work easier but also can be used as a tool to increase sales in advertising point of view. I think before this assignment I haven’t realize how different ways I could use different ePlatforms to make my work easier. And I am certainly taking advance of these in future. I think I still have lot to discover in this area.