Use your data to build a better experience

Delayed flights. Lost luggage. Sketchy cab rides. Noisy hotel guests. For many years, Marriott has understood that the travel struggles are real. But it’s only recently that they’ve found ways to ease the pain with data. Their solution: Collecting, harnessing, and redeploying customer information from all along the travel journey—far beyond the hotel stay itself. By amassing a wide range of data from vacation searches, flight bookings, car rentals, cruises, hotel check-ins, room service, spa treatments, and more, Marriott has developed a series of “predictable data points” for each of its guests, whether they’re first-time visitors or loyal members of the rewards program.

Travel stress is introduced by unknowns. So Marriott extracts the “data points” inside each traveler’s head—the fight she always takes or the coffee shop he always visits—and preloads that information into its data platform. From there, Marriott finds ways to wrap each customer experience in the predictable data points that customers prefer. It could be something simple and delightful, like serving black coffee to a guest who always takes her coffee black—before she even has to ask. Or it could be something even more potentially stress-saving, like offering early check-in to a guest who always comes in on the red eye.

Customer insights, such as the predictable data points Marriott gathers, are at the heart of effective personalization. And the first step toward gaining this deep insight is to know who your customers and prospects are across every touchpoint in their unique travel journeys—not just at the points where they’ll encounter your brand. This means connecting with them from the moment they start imagining a trip all the way until they get back home and share their travel photos.

Online travel agencies like Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity, as well as meta-search sites like Kayak, already touch travelers at many points along their journeys. Because they’ve built a more holistic view of the traveler than most traditional travel brands, they’re able to offer solutions from airfare and hotels to car rentals and vacation activities, all from a single site. Traditional travel brands, on the other hand, have some catching up to do.

Creating a truly holistic view of the traveler requires gathering and linking data from disparate sources, including opt-in data from your own CRM system, data from your company’s call center interactions, booking flow metrics, purchase data, customer data from social applications, and comprehensive device usage data information from data co-ops.17 Equipped with all this customer intelligence, you’ll be better able to connect with travelers across their journeys—not only in the places you typically interact with them, but anywhere and everywhere they go.

But it only works if all your users understand the data and can act on it. “This is where our industry falls flat,” says Ahmed El-Emam, a digital strategist at WestJet. ˝The answer, he explains, is to shift from traditional “systems of record,” which focus on processes, to “systems of engagement,” which focus on people. By integrating customer data with new mobile and social technologies, systems of engagement help brands deliver experiences in the precise moment that travelers need them—like combining app and location context to know when a guest has entered your hotel and wants to check in, and even when she’s made it to her room and may want to order room service.

“This isn’t just a marketing function,” says El-Emam. “It’s about where data is stored, how you access it, how to integrate systems, and how to provide data transparency throughout the organization. It’s about how to surface information and make it actionable.”

Building a more complete view of the customer also allows travel brands to build models that can predict future customer behavior and responses—so you don’t have to guess which offer will resonate with which traveler. Use of new cognitive technologies takes this predictive marketing to all-new levels. With the IBM Watson platform, for instance, predictive insights aren’t just based on historical and transactional data, but also on psychographic insights about what customers are thinking, feeling, and saying.

Because Watson understands languages, learns as it processes information, and can actually reason a lot like humans do, the platform can make sense of unstructured data from the social sphere—like words a customer commonly uses on Facebook and Twitter. Correlating this social data with the National Psychiatric Index personality scale, Watson can help brands understand a traveler’s unique personality, from how agreeable a customer may be to how stressed out he’s likely to get. Equipped with insights like these, you can understand customers like never before and better imagine what a unique experience would look like for each of them—so you can provide one-to-one experiences that truly fit the way they think, feel, act, and live.

To learn how to build a complete view of travelers so you can find new ways to connect with them throughout their travel journeys, read “The Beauty of Integration.”

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