Do you deliver a consistent customer experience across all touchpoints?

There is a need for added marketing technology investment borne out of the extra pressure on campaign management as a result of more focused targeting. If, instead of targeting a mass audience with one approach, we need to target 10 segments across different channels with multiple, unique approaches – this creates challenges for campaign management processes. The complexity to accurately target and execute has driven greater adoption of marketing automation technology. It is the joining of human subject matter expertise and software technology to utilize data, analytics, and business rules in addressing this new, hyper-targeted, integrated marketing world.

And it doesn’t stop at marketing automation, which traditionally includes replacing the myriad of high-touch repetitive campaign execution tasks with software. Marketing operations technology enables an interactive user environment to handle creative processes, digital assets, leadership approvals, third party partner efforts, time lines, and much more. As marketers imagine new and adventurous approaches using new forms of data and analytics, special consideration must be given to the process of execution. The propensity for human error will increase, reaching unstable levels and result in negative customer experiences.

It is making the most of all of this data on your customers that will provide the best results. Analytic-centric approaches such as marketing optimization provide the underlying technology to make the most of this data. The practice of marketing optimization is the endeavor to contact the right customers with the right offers at the right time, while staying within budget and channel capacities, all without cannibalizing future sales or burdening customers with too many messages. Marketing optimization helps to maximize economic outcomes by making the most of each individual customer communication. This approach increases marketing return on investment by determining the best offers for individual customers and by providing analysis of the most effective way to spend the marketing budget while considering business constraints, such as channel selection and capacity, offer promotion strategies, and contact policies.

There are three main benefits of implementing marketing optimization technology:

1. Improved return on investment for marketing

2. More focused contact strategy

3. Increased organizational efficiency

The return on investment for marketing is derived from several areas of improvement, including increasing targeting effectiveness which results in higher response rates, improved channel effectiveness, reduced spending on campaigns, fewer deleted e-mails and fewer unwanted ad solicitations. The math-based approach offered by marketing optimization techniques produce results that are superior to segmentation and rules-based approaches to prioritizing marketing offers. When it comes to contact strategy, complex contact policies are required to avoid over-saturating customers and violating corporate governance requirements. Marketing optimization techniques can eliminate uncoordinated and conflicting communications while incorporating relevant relationship factors such as customer risk, advertising exposure and house-holding into the optimization to ensure that valuable customers are receiving the best possible set of communications across every channel.

Lastly, marketing optimization techniques can show where and how changes in channel usage, target customer segments, campaign budget, and other constraints will affect the business, and highlight financial opportunities and unused capacity. Overall, marketing optimization blends technology, methodologies, and Big Data capabilities to address the business challenge of making the most of customer interactions across all digital touch points.

But we cannot forget that we live in a multichannel world, what means that travel companies must deliver a consistent customer experience across all touchpoints. Let´s focus now on hotels. Customer experience for hotels is about consistency. It isn’t just about working out new self-service tools, mobile apps or a new service. Although some of these initiatives can work on their own, there needs to be consistency across all touchpoints  based on the guest’s requirements. And all this must be backed up by a solid technology roadmap.

Against this backdrop, hotels are currently trying to come up with solutions that address customer and user experience (UX) issues. Creating an unambiguous cross-channel experience is of paramount importance, both from a customer experience and UX standpoint, argues Stan Kreydin, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology officer for hospitality company Wyndham Exchange & Rentals. “Where possible, we want our customers to have a similar experience with our products via self-service channels such as the web as they do with our contact centre agents for our assisted service channels,” he says.

Where the firm syndicates products to channel partners, Kreydin argues for the importance of a consistent operating platform. “In doing this, we create an ERP-like open systems-based platform that channels legacy information in near-real-time with contextual pricing and business logic by channel,” he says.

Kim Walker, Senior Vice President and Creative Director of Morgans Hotel Group agrees that the main objective of the group is to create a consistent experience that translates the culture of hotels to a digital platform.

“The experience guests have with hotel staff is engaging and streamlined, and we made it a top priority for consumers to feel the same way when interacting with our website,” she says. With the new site guests can make reservations in four clicks or less, tour the city they’re visiting with a curated Google Map outlining the top locations, and access an Instagram feed populated with photos from guests staying at the property.

Morgans Hotel Group guests are early adopters so it is important that we are able to communicate effectively with them in every medium. This could be by creating a seamless booking experience on mobile devices or building a social media integration on the website that allows guests to instantly post their travel plans on any of their social media platforms.

The team at Pullman Hotels and Resorts, the upscale international brand of Accor, focuses on delivering a cosmopolitan, vibrant and in-style experience for guests.  

“Pullman Hotels & Resorts offers a new approach to upscale hospitality in which technology plays a key role,” says Xavier Louyot, SVP Global Marketing, Pullman. There have been a  few major initiatives this year including:  

·          The new Pullman Hotels website has been set up with the evolving lifestyle of tech-savvy customers in mind. Pullman focused on the aspirations of its ’hyper-connected, mobile, multi-cultural’ travellers who believe that just because they are travelling for business doesn’t mean they shouldn’t enjoy themselves. And just because they are travelling for leisure doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be connected’. 

·          Pullman has also worked on a unique guest technology ecosystem this year. The initiative is all about synchronising various screens – TV, smartphone and tablet in order to create a unified network of entertainment services. For this, Pullman chose Quadriga’s Personal Media Network (PMN) solution. This move is expected to lend a new dimension to a customer’s overall stay, with a seamless, unified experience.

According to Louyot, the multi-device phenomenon does not only impact the online experience Pullman offers its customers, but it also impacts the in-hotel experience offered at their properties. The latter experience, is coined ‘connectivity by Pullman’, This has several implications including:

·          The multiplication of IP addresses which allows the company  to increase the bandwidth offered at all Pullman properties.

·          A brand standard of multiple power sockets placed near beds.

·          A currently piloted brand new ’Pullman Unified Experience’ concept which integrates the TV, smartphone and tablet, as well as different kinds of personal content whether it is stored on a device, delivered from a set top box-based or subscription-oriented into a single application. This makes for a seamless experience for customers to access different type of content, regardless of the device used, for as long as they are connected to the hotel’s WiFi network.

Hotels are currently all trying to match the rising expectations of guests. Check-in and check-out, for instance, is one area where guests tend to be merciless – they don’t like to waste time and expect immediate service. The same goes for free Wifi which they expect to access as soon as they enter any property.

“The days of Wifi being a luxury are long gone and the bar has definitely been raised. Now, smartphones are part of the guest experience and have extended into all areas, from air travel to retail. The consumer is able to access all areas of life through this medium which is why integrating social media into our website and improving our mobile and tablet presence was of utmost importance to us,” says Walker.

Such initiatives are not only significant from guest services perspective; they can also contribute to  bringing operational efficiency as well as revenue generation. One good example of thos is Marriott’s Mobile Check-In, that has gone worldwide from the U.K. to Mexico, the UAE and India, and by 2014, all 500 hotels should have the mobile check-in function. So in case you’ve got a Marriott hotel stay coming up soon, this is how it works:

1. Join Marriott Rewards

2. Check-in to your hotel at 4pm the day before your arrival, then the app will send you an automatic notification when the room is ready.

3. Arrive at the hotel and bypass the front desk by hitting up the «expedited mobile check-in desk» to pick up your room key.

4. Head up to your room.