5
min read
David Shull
Mar 22, 2024
Tern’s product webinar on March 21st was one for the memory books. In our high energy webinar style, Tern revealed four game-changing new features to a record breaking number of attendees. In this post, we’ll cover the major updates to Tern and how it will help travel advisors save time and reduce errors while surprising and delighting their clients.
We reject the notion that travelers have to choose between working with an expert and having great technology. At Tern, we believe that by combining word-class technology with the uniquely human experiences offered by a travel advisor will define the future of travel.
We believe technology should be a travel advisor’s best friend and that tools like automation and AI can free up advisors to spend time on the parts of the job they love.
Email has always been a big part of a travel advisor’s workflow. Historically, CRMs have tried to engage with email through complicated DNS masking configurations. These were hard to set up and were plagued with deliverability issues. Getting email into travel CRMs meant remembering complicated addresses to forward or BCC into. We knew there had to be a better way, so we built it.
Tern users can now seamlessly integrate their email into the Tern system. Setup is easy and requires no complex configuration. Best of all, Tern integrates with virtually 100% of email providers.
Your clients want to hear from you. Not a donotreply@tern.travel email. We’re proud to share that every email you send from Tern now comes directly from your inbox. You’ll find them in your sent folder with no indication they were written or sent from Tern.
We know a lot of your most important emails are about trips you’re planning for clients. Tern now allows you to take any email and associate it with a trip right from the email tab in Tern. Once assigned, those emails will show up within the trip so you can have everything in one place.
Let’s say you’re working with a DMC on a trip to Europe. Your point of contact isn’t a traveler on the trip but you’d like to have all the communications with them within the trip for easy access. Just categorize the message thread as associated with that trip and Tern will automatically make it available within the email tab of the trip.
Soon, Tern will be releasing AI features to make categorizing and triaging emails within Tern even faster. Tern AI will bring parsing to email to allow for easy one-click parsing of any email type.
We know advisors often send the same type of email over and over again. Now you can create message templates in Tern and reuse them over, and over again. Message templates include the option to add variables like first name, trip name, and trip link to personalize the message automatically.
Our team is hard at work on additional updates to the email feature in Tern. We’ll be adding in the ability to include photos, add attachments, archive emails, better organization, click tracking, and so much more. Keep an eye on Molly’s product updates for details!
We understand how important your email data is. We’ve designed Tern from the ground up with security in mind. We even went through a five month security review with Google’s security team in order to get their permission to integrate directly with Gmail. Encryption, strong passwords, two factor authentication, and other technology safeguards mean your email is safe in Tern.
Automations and workflows help advisors stay on top of everything that goes into managing their business. Automations let advisors set up triggers to automatically send emails or create tasks. Workflows let advisors create task lists and bulk-apply automations to trips and contacts. Together with message and task templates these features create a powerful automation toolkit.
Automations allow advisors to define a trigger and a set of actions that should happen when that trigger happens. Triggers can be related to trips or use data from the CRM. This makes it easy to stay on top of your client relationships, even if they don’t have an upcoming trip.
These triggers can be used to create a task or send a message. We plan to add more triggers over time based on advisor feedback.
We know that advisors have certain tasks and automations based on where a trip is in their process. Workflows enable that. Advisors can add multiple tasks and automations to a workflow and set the workflow to automatically apply when a trip is created or moves into a certain stage.
Workflows work for contacts too. For example, advisors could create a workflow to create a task and send an email reminder to clients one year before passport expires. To make it easy to add these workflows, Tern created bulk apply and auto-apply features. Advisors can add a workflow to all contacts or trips, or filter down by trip stage or contact tag to apply the workflow to a subset of trips.
Tern was joined by Jennifer Jacob, COO and co-founder of Tique. Jenn shared a brand new set of templates they’ve crafted for Tern’s automation and workflow features. For existing Tique clients that have purchased any template package they can get the Tern templates at no additional cost! If you’re interested in the Tiquetemplates fill out the form here to learn more.
We ended the webinar with a sneak preview of Tern AI. We anticipate the first AI features to roll out next month (April) and couldn’t be more excited for the impact they’ll have on advisors.
There is so much to say about Tern AI that we decided to create another blog post dedicated just to that. You can check it out here.
