Provide a Sky-High Customer Experience

Rainbow Ryders has been helping people check off their bucket lists since 1983. Founded in Albuquerque, N.M, Rainbow Ryders has been providing scenic hot air balloon rides year-round for tourists and locals alike, and is currently the number one rated balloon ride company in Albuquerque, Phoenix, and Colorado Springs, and the largest in the United States overall.

Rainbow Ryders began with just one balloon operating out of a home garage.

A far cry from its humble beginnings, this business has expanded to three cities with a fleet of over 20 balloons, and now serves hundreds of thousands clients per year, showing no signs of slowing down.

Lindsay Fattor, General Manager at Rainbow Ryders, says they began looking for a new phone service in 2015 as their previous phone provider didn’t allow for flexible remote work.

After researching and comparing a few companies, Rainbow Ryders settled on Nextiva as their new phone service provider.

Fly High with Flexible Features

Rainbow Ryders was set up and ready to go within a week with help from Nextiva’s customer support team.

Opting for voicemail to email, the Nextiva App, and voice recording has helped Rainbow Ryders achieve the level of flexibility they were looking for from a new provider.

“The recording has been the number one most helpful thing. We use it more than anything to troubleshoot. Say something happened with a reservation and we need to figure out exactly what went on during the call.

It’s easy to pull that call, and recordings don’t lie. Another way we’ll use it is to figure out when a phone number gets entered incorrectly. I can easily go back and verify,” says Lindsay.

Fielding hundreds of calls per day and open 365 days a year, Lindsay says the Nextiva phone system lets them give their employees a good quality of life by allowing their office employees to work from home when they need to.

Their balloon pilots also benefit from their phone system when they’re out on the field and need to call passengers.

“It’s very helpful. Especially when they’re calling passengers at 6 a.m. to cancel a flight. It looks like the call is coming from Rainbow Ryders and our pilots aren’t getting calls back from the passengers directly to their cell phones.

The passengers are calling back to the office, at which point we have office staff ready to help them reschedule,” said Lindsay.

Run Your Business More Efficiently

As for their yearly operations, Lindsay says they use the Nextiva Analytics add-on to help run their business more efficiently.

“We pull analytics on a yearly or quarterly basis to see how we’re pacing. It’s nice that it has historical data as well, so we can see how we’re pacing in relation to last year.

It also helps me with staffing and determining when we are the busiest with phone calls and will need more assistance in the office to answer those calls.”

Although Rainbow Ryders isn’t the only hot air balloon service in those areas, Lindsay says the Nextiva phone system gives them a competitive advantage among other companies by allowing them to stay open longer and answer more questions.

“Customer service is one of our competitive advantages. We want to be able to be available to our customers every day of the week for any questions they may have.

This is a type of experience that people are not familiar with. They don’t do it every day, so usually they do have a lot of questions and we want to be here for them.”

To those who are thinking of switching to Nextiva, Lindsay says Nextiva is a great choice if your business has multiple locations, as its flexibility allows for it to be managed in a relatively simple way.

“Overall, we are very, very happy we switched to Nextiva, and we’re not looking back.”