Making Hospitality Marketing Customer-centric

Most often hospitality industry talk a lot about customer service at the property as a key differentiator to customer experience & satisfaction.

I believe this is not the case and most often, it starts with even before the customer visits the hotel or the restaurant of choice. Also, there are many a times, the post usage experience is forgotten and very rarely have I ever seen any credible data-led customer marketing intiatives in this phase. 

It was interesting to see Intercontinental Hotels do very interesting customer marketing work in this area. Here are some interesting facts: 

• Intercontinental Hotel Group’s (IHG’s) uses of data-driven marketing to improve communications with existing customers and prospects is an interesting case study for many hotel groups across the world.
  

• Lincoln Barrett, vice president for guest marketing and alliances, shared that, for IHG, building a customer-centric marketing strategy is based on 3 Key pillars:
  

          - Invest in technology
          - Expand into new frontiers
          - Build a centralized customer organization

She was talking at the UNICA Marketing Innovation Summit in Orlando.

• She talked about the need for real-time data mart that would allow IHG to match the data it was gathering through proprietary and third-party sources to existing customer information. 
  
• According to her this step also made it possible to gain immediate access to data for analysis or campaign building purposes – a significant upgrade to IHG's previous functionality, which updated records in batches and only made data available some 30 days after a customer incident (like a hotel stay).
• She talked about some interesting trends in hospitality Marketing - Right Time marketing, Channel Synergy, Glocal Communication, Non-member marketing etc. 

Affiliate Marketing meets Social Marketing

With digital marketing taking centrestage, it time to reassess and evaluate age-old marketing techniques and adapt them to new digital world. Here's how Domino's Pizza is doing it.

Domino's Pizza is using the persuasive power  of socially connected consumers who have huge influence over each other; the key idea here is  how they harness that power and put it to work for thier brand—with rewards, of course, for the consumers in question.

Domino's Pizza has developed a widget that consumers can place on their social networking profile, blog or other online presence, which their friends can then click on in order to order a pizza. For every order, they get 0.5 percent of the sale.

 

Read more here

Creating "wow" at the Retail front end?

Last week, Cequity was speaking at an event hosted by the Retailers Association of India(RAI) and the topic was really about how Retailers can make Customer experience their true diffrentiator!

The interesting thing in Retail is that eventually ,competitive advantage in location,merchandize assortments & price can be replicated by competition ,but Customer experience can be a unique diffrentiator. The difficult thing about this is that Retail brands have so many touch points with customers and how do you make each of these interactions "memorable".

Many organizations,especially in growth markets & industries are already dangerously "out of synch" from their customers.  One of the indicators of this is this Bain’s research that found 80% of companies believed they were delivering a superior customer experience while only 8% of their customers thought they were receiving a superior experience.

I believe that the key lies in not making the "customer experience" the accountability for any one function but rather making it a key company competency across function. Bruce Temkin of Forrester has this interesting perspective "Treat customer experience as a competence, not a function. Delivering great customer experiences isn’t something that a small group of people can do on their own — everyone in the company needs to be fully engaged in the effort. It all starts at the top; the CEO and his executive team need to be fully engaged in the effort. To keep a companywide focus on customers, companies need a systematic and continuous approach for incorporating customer insights into all of their efforts. That’s why we recommend building a voice-of-the-customer program".

In the last 12 months Customer experience management (CEM) has started to get more profile but it is still just a good idea emerging into an area of marketing thought currently dominated by CRM. CEM is currently a poor cousin to CRM. If it is to grow up and become a powerful business tool it must move out of marketing and directly link itself to business outcomes.  See what Adam Ramshaw has to say about ‘Will Customer Experience Management grow up big and strong like its rich cousin CRM?

http://crmguru.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/crmguru.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1638

 

 

EVENT-BASED MARKETING HELPS BANKS PINPOINT AND BENEFIT FROM CHANGES IN CUSTOMER BEHAVIOR

For years Banks have relied on "push marketing". Manufacture a product (say a credit card) and then go pushing it into the market using the most "intrusive" methods possible. DSAs(direct sales associates) in the Indian market perfected this art and they would push a credit card to you outside an airport in a mall and in fact anywhere.This push marketing got the banks huge increase in acquistion rates and thereby the "Cards in force" jumped up but not the quality of the customer! And that has led to todays situation where most bank credit card portfolios are under threat with large deliquencies.

How do Banks and other Financial services marketers move from a paradigm of push marketing which is essentially choosing the "Banks time to market" to a new paradigm where the bank chooses "Customer's time to market" by observing changes in behaviour which occur in the customers life.A sudden substantial balance in a customers savings account should trigger a bank's campaign to sell insurance or a mutual fund.

Customers always have a reason behind their actions and the banks have all the data in which customers are actually leaving their "footprints behind". If companies deduce these reasons, event based marketing can positively exploit all customer database to draw a winning marketing strategy. Dan Smith talks about how Event-based marketing (EBM) has emerged as a new paradigm to turn traditional segment-centric direct marketing on its head.

http://www.customerthink.com/article/event_based_marketing_banks_changes_behavior

 

The Complaining Customer-predict her!

The complaining customer - we just can’t stand them! Well, most of us can’t stand them.  The reality is that business organizations should love them.  Shep Hyken comments that "A complaining customer tells you where you can improve.  They actually come forward and show us where we make mistakes. But, most of the time, people hate to hear the complaints. First, a few facts you should know about people who complain.  Most of the time, when people have a complaint, they complain to everyone else rather than the person or people who caused the complaint. If you resolve your customers’ complaints, you will keep them most of the time.  But first you have to know there is a complaint.  So, how can we find those complainers? Well, most likely customers won’t tell us, so, we have to ask them. It is that simple.  Call them up or ask them in person.  Actively solicit feedback to find out what they are thinking." 

And most criticaly use Customer behaviour data to spot Customer service failures as they occur. Customers are constantly leaving behind a data footprint of "failed brand promises". Direct data analytics to spot incidents of customer promises "not met". The crux of " Analytical marketing" is using data to drive an improved customer experience. Imagine if a bank were to call you up and say " I am sorry sir ,we are one day behind schedule on your cheque book request,please accept our apologies and your cheque book will be with you tomorrow morning". Or better still build predictive models to find customers where "service levels are likely to slip" and then proactively monitor that customer's transactions to create a moment of delight.

And when you find a problem or complaint, resolve it on the spot. No company is perfect.  So find out what those imperfections might be. And, when you hear about a problem, fix it.  And make sure you give that customer a reason to come back so you can do it right the next time.  Take that moment of misery and turn it into a MOMENT OF MAGIC.See what Shep Hyken has to say about ‘The Complaining Customer’http://www.hyken.com/Article_11.html

Extract greater value from existing CRM applications!

In this down economy, organizations must maximize the value they get from every available resource. Often CRM has been thought of as a long term strategy and companies have looked for long term returns from these investments.What gets missed out is that there are many ways to get "quick wins" from CRM. Too many CRM initiatives have failed becuase too much effort was spent on creating effective capability and not enough effort spent on "finding and extracting short term profit opportunities". Have a look at this interesting article from Mc Kinsey which talks about how you can use CRM to drive short term profitability enhancement.Take a look at what Mc Kinsey calls Tactical CRM !!

Also with the advent of software-as-a-service (SaaS) technologies, your organization can easily and cost-effectively extract greater value from your CRM - and demonstrate greater value to your customers. Often building organization capability takes years ,but using the SaaS technologies allows you to bring in a specialist team along with a customized technology application.

See what Michael Zirngibl, CEO, Angel.com has to say about ‘Extract greater value from existing CRM applications'.

http://www.dmnews.com/Extract-greater-value-from-existing-CRM-applications/article/126869/

How do CIOs tame the CRM beast?

MOST chief information officers (CIOs) may believe that these are not the right times for new projects with expensive funding requirements. But this might prove myopic, especially where customer relationship management (CRM) is concerned.

The last thing an organization would want now is to lose customers. This is the time to deepen relationships with customers. It is on the strength of these relationships that companies will survive the downturn. In fact, most market analysts are telling companies to invest in the most suitable CRM technology before the competition beats them to it.

I also feel that the key point here is that it takes time for key benefits to accrue out of a CRM strategy. For a large organization,it may take 2 to 4 years to extract enough value to make Business impact happen. This is largely because the Change management required in process,people,structure & incentives takes time to play out!

Most companies have invested huge quantities of capital in their back-office environments. To move forward in today's economic reality, these companies need to free investments in one area of the business to fund more important business strategies such as CRM.

See what Nitin Pradhan,has to say about the Customer being King.

http://www.blonnet.com/ew/2002/02/27/stories/2002022700100200.htm

When a customer calls-make it count!

Each time a customer makes contact with an organization through any channel, it is an opportunity to build the relationship and also revenue!In fact even a customer complaint call is actually a gold mine,because very few customers actually care enough for the brand to actually complain! In growth countries like India ,the added opportunity is to use the inbound calls as vehicles for customer education leading to better onboarding of customers.

There are monumental gains to be realized when companies prepare themselves to engage with customers who are calling in. When consumers contact an organization, whether a communications firm, financial institution, retailer or otherwise, that organization has already incurred a cost, simply by answering the phone or putting up a Web site. The challenge is how to more effectively convert those interactions into value opportunities for the consumer and the brand alike.

In order to do this, marketers need to change their perspective and let the customer history, marketplace and business objective drive the engagement at an individual level. Aligning key elements of the customer engagement model, such as channel, cycle, content, cost and competition, as well as embedding advanced analytics into the offer catalog, facilitates personalized one-on-one communication. With an integrated process, high-volume consumer brands can increase conversion rates, identify qualified leads, improve retention and increase satisfaction levels by engaging consumers in targeted conversations.

See what Diane Lucero has to say about ‘Optimizing customer engagement'.

http://www.dmnews.com/Optimizing-customer-engagement/article/127545/

Loyalty Equals Growth for Sony

 

Here's an interesting article from 1:1 Media on how even a well established company like Sony wants to embrace customer-centricity:

At last week's Conference Board Customer Loyalty conference, Sony Electronics Senior Vice President of Service Platfom Dan Wiersma asked attendees how many of them owned Sony devices. Every hand in the room went up.

So why would a company like Sony, which has so many customers, look at customer-focused initiatives to drive loyalty programmes? "Customer loyalty is the pathway to long-term sustainable growth," he said. Even a company as successful as Sony can't rest on its laurels as competitors flood the marketplace. "Technology is still important, but the customer experience is critical."

Sony discovered that customers have very high expectations of quality across the customer experience, from the products themselves to the packaging. "In some cases the packaging inside the box was just a pile of papers," Wiersma said. "Customers expected something more sophisticated and organized from Sony."

In another example, Sony discovered that customers shopping in a Sony Style store consider it a high-end experience. They wanted a nice box and bag for their purchases, so they could walk around showing off their purchase [à la the very recognizable Tiffany's blue bag.] As a result, in November the company redesigned its Vaio computer box and reorganized its packaging. As an added touch, each box now contains a thank-you card from Vaio's senior general manager, containing his direct phone number and email address.

These are just some of the first steps in Sony's loyalty journey, Wiersma said. While the Vaio product group has been very aggressive with its loyalty programme strategy, some other groups are a little slower to take action. In addition, Sony plans to start working with retailers to identify and interact with the majority of Sony consumers who remain anonymous.

Wiersma hopes to keep internal momentum going with assigned "loyalty leads" for each business unit to help support the loyalty programme strategy. Sony has also set up an internal website called Customer Experience Excellence, where every employee can view loyalty data such as customer verbatim, survey results, and business unit action plans. "It gives employees the opportunity to leverage their capabilities and compare themselves to other business units," Wiersma said.

Marketing metrics in action - Case study

 

It's always easy to think about marketing metrics but very difficult to implement on the ground. Here's a great case study by US Bank presented at the recent ANA Marketing Conference last week: