Posted by S Swaminathan on Sun, May 30, 2010
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.
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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.
Posted by Ajay Kelkar on Sun, Jun 28, 2009
Companies collect so much data today and yet when you go looking for it you will often find barriers! So what’s wrong…If we were honest with ourselves, as professionals, we would admit what Rosabeth Moss Kanter suggested in 1979 in a famous Harvard Business Review article: that “Power is Americas last dirty word. It is easier to talk about money -- and much easier to talk about sex -- than it is to talk about power. People who have it deny it; people who want to it do not want to appear to hunger for it; and people who engage in its machinations do so secretly”.
Data is power and so within every business, people hoard data. Functional managers fight with each other to “not allow access”. What this does is create huge asymmetry in the information that a company has about its customers. This gets further aggravated by the fact that no one business function is tasked with “getting all this data together and creating insight for the enterprise”. Many companies have tried to attack this problem by building Datawarehouses! But this path is expensive and often fraught with danger of failure –again due to data politics.
Marc Demarest has this interesting take on why Datawarehouses fail :
http://www.noumenal.com/marc/dwpoly.html
How do you attack this problem? In my view the following go a long way in discouraging creation of data silos in any organization:
1. CEO commitment to decision making with facts. Not just lip service but truly compelling demands from the CEO to show evidence before making any important decision.
2. A change agent combination-the best one is if the CIO & CMO play the tango! Both recognize the power of actionable information for the company and work to make the “Data to insight to action” transformation happen!
3. Realistic CMO who does not wait for all data to be accessible. Instead she/he launches a series of incremental data based marketing initiatives that propel an interest in the impact that customer data could make in the overall marketing efforts.
Akin Arikin has this lovely post on how you can create competitive advantage for your company by using analytics more cleverly than your competitors and what data is required to help you do that. Check out more at
http://www.multichannelmetrics.com/competing-of-data-for-competing-on-analytics/
Posted by Ajay Kelkar on Thu, Jun 18, 2009
Customers are using your services through multiple channels. Customer's access their bank through either the branch or Internet banking or other channels such as ATMs and mobile banking. Multi channel behavior however needs to be intelligently decoded. Mc Kinsey research shows that Multichannel customers spend on average 20 to 30% more than single channel users. More than 80 percent of a broad cross-section of U.S. retailers now report that they sell merchandise through multiple channels. Currently, customer data are rarely analyzed to understand how individual customers behave across channels. This, however, seems to be the key to understanding the intricacies of how the channels work together. Have a look at this interesting Mc Kinsey research- Steering customers to lower cost channels.pdf
Also it is no point doing the analytics and then not taking action! Multi channel behavior is a huge opportunity for a marketer if you are able to consistently use each interaction to market better! Intelligent use of technology to improve the customer's multi channel experience can be a huge differentiator! Especially in growth markets such as India a lot of companies are at an early stage of customer acquisition. Relevant technology brought in early can make a huge difference.
James Taylor has this interesting take on how a bank can make your multi channel experience a powerful competitive advantage.
Here is what he says
"So, what if your bank...
- always identified you when you put your card in the ATM, called the call center, handed over a check at the teller
- remembered your preferences
- remembered your regular activities and prioritized them
- accurately predicted your likely behavior/needs
- applied constraints and circumstances (ATM wait time, call center wait time, teller v personal banker) to its approach
- used the information you gave them, no matter how you gave it to them
and so on...
How might that look?" Check out more at http://www.edmblog.com/weblog/2006/09/using_decisioni.html