Travel brands everywhere are rushing headlong into data and
analytics to try and get closer to their customers but what are the keys to
success? A new report investigates …
EyeforTravel’s new report series into behavioural analytics
is looking at what makes customer tick and how travel brands can use data
techniques to improve every part of their sales process. In the first report in
the series, Understanding the Travel Consumer,
EyeforTravel alongside leading travel brands, is opening up the data processes
and techniques necessary to drive insight. Core to this is how to treat the
data itself. Here are some key pieces of advice from the report
that can help you to unlock the potential in your data.
Concentrate Data
In the report,
every travel brand featured advocated consolidating data into centralized
systems. This is because it then becomes easier to drive reporting, analytics,
automation, and personalization from a single source.
For car hire company Hertz, they realized that they needed a ‘golden
record’ for each customer. Ricardo Rangel, senior director of
data architecture at Hertz defines this “a single,
well-defined version of all the data entities in an organisation.”
First, they had to pool their data before
they could run it through a customer matching engine, which has “the capability
of searching, indexing and giving back the information about that customer.”
Layered on top of this is an “application network” that interfaces across the
business to provide a wide variety of services via Application Programming
Interfaces (APIs), from alerting about a flat tire or issue with a particular
model of car, to giving customers their preferred car type.
NH Hotels moved their property
management system, central reservations system, customer relationship
management and revenue management solution to the same database and Eurail has
one “data warehouse” accessible to all employees via desktops or mobile
phones.
Travel digital marketing expert at McKinsey & Co Del
Ross advises looking at your needs and budget – especially for smaller firms –
working with a third-party specialist, and holding your data remotely in the
“cloud”. “Storage space, speed, access, and security are all important
considerations in data strategy,” he advises. “These factors combine to make
cloud sourcing more compelling. Using
the principle, ‘only do what only you can do,’ brands should capitalize on the
technical expertise of specialty service providers and invest their resources
into analytics and gathering actionable insights.”
However, Maria Gómez Bada, manager of analytics and data insights
for HomeAway.com, points out that “If you have data internally, you will always
have more actions on the data and be able to get more insight. If you have it
externally, it’s probably cheaper short-term but you have a black box.”
Ask What Are You
Asking?
When it comes to data, it is easy to get lost and find
yourself tied up in a tide of requests and dead-ends that don’t lead to actual
improvement. The key is to define the requirements in crystal clear terms
before setting out. “What we learned … was that we needed to understand the
question or the problem that we were trying to solve and our audience so that
we could structure the dashboards to serve them,” says Priti
Dhanda, director of revenue management analytics at Hyatt. “The properties
had very different requirements to the above property people. So, a key goal
was how do you use the same data and answer questions for the different
audiences?”
Deploy First, Test
Later
If you’re
looking to expand your organization’s data analytics then the experts in the
report recommend getting solutions set up and operating so they can be tested
and perfected rather than trying to build a great system from the outset. “It
doesn’t need to be perfect [on release] and then we continue to improve it,”
says Dhanda. “If we just focus on building that most
perfect solution, we would never get there, and we would still be thinking and
trying to get even a sample out.”
The testing of systems then becomes critical.
“In the CRM space, we test absolutely everything,” said Darrin
Rowe, director, customer insights & loyalty at Greyhound Lines speaking at
Smart Travel Data North America 2018.
“It’s an A/B test for every single thing we do. So, thinking about creative,
thinking about copy and subject lines. There’s no magic bullet here, it’s just
a ton of A/B testing and figuring out what resonates with our customers.”
According to Steven Consiglio, product performance
manager at Booking.com, his organization has found that “It is impossible to even have
hypotheses turn out to be accurate in our findings,” which makes testing vital
to uncover those unintuitive findings. Therefore, on their site, “The amount of
different site experimentations is countless. The experimentation is
ever-present.”
Visualize for Success
Visualization is critical for data-led analysis. As the
quantity of data exponentially increases, visual means are frequently the only
way to comprehend and extrapolate meaning. Furthermore, data has been found to be
far more convincing than just presenting the bald numbers, making it vital for
gaining buy-in from colleagues.
“Visualizing does not need to be difficult –
it turns difficult content and relationships into understandable information,” says
Ina Hoppe, data analyst and systems development manager at Leonardo
Hotels. “Pre-think what you want to
show, or you will draw sophisticated dashboards no one will use. Ask your teams
what they want, and keep it simple,” a sentiment that harks back to Dhanda’s
advice when creating a project.
Let the Law Lead
“I think data is the future of everything that we do and
we’re scraping the surface,” says Alessandra di Lorenzo, Chief Commercial Officer, Media and Partnerships at
lastminute.com group. “We must never as companies, even as individuals,
underestimate the power of data and the importance of managing that data in a
compliant way that doesn’t damage the company’s relationship with customers. My
answer is [to] probably get some help if you’re not very big, because it’s
tricky and even the big players are still learning.”
This is now all the more vital as the European General Data
Protection Regulation has come into force and means that customers must agree
explicitly to all uses for their personal data, that data must be protected,
and they can delete it.
Practical
solutions brands can take to comply and still have a strong set of customer
data include separating and anonymizing data. Amer
Mohammed, head of digital innovation at Stena Line ferry firm says it now splits data into
two copies: The first is anonymized, the second is personal. “In the marketing
you have personal data where you can identify the individual, in the second we
have anonymous, aggregated data,” he
told the EyeforTravel Smart Travel Data Summit 2017. “If a customer asks us to delete their data, we
only delete the first one. The second we use to get to know our customers.”
This allows them to continue drawing conclusions whilst protecting the data and
allowing customers to delete it easily.
- Booking.com
- HomeAway.com
- Hyatt
- Hertz
- Expedia
- Lastminute.com Group
- McKinsey & Co
- Stena Line
