Mindtree partnered with a hospitality giant to integrate customer data across multiple sources and to personalize offers for hotel guests leveraging a 360 degree view of customers.
Client background
The client is a global hospitality leader with more than 3000 hotels and resorts around the globe in over 70 countries. The client is not only among the leaders in this industry, but also constantly engaged in setting industry benchmarks in offering their customers the best, most customized experiences.
Industry landscape
New advances in technology (smartphones, digital transformation, Big Data and IoT) continue to alter the relationship between the hospitality industry and its guests. Increasing digitalization is generating more data than ever before. Every customer touch point is now an opportunity to collect data. However, hospitality providers often lack the analytical capabilities to translate these touchpoints into insights that can create a measurable and sustainable return on investment (ROI). As the use of mobile devices, social media and advanced analytics continues to proliferate, technology has created new opportunities for hospitality organizations to drive operating efficiencies, improve the return on advertising spend, better understand guest preferences and build stronger customer relationships.
Estimated Business Outcomes:
- Improved campaign effectiveness and ROI (6-8% growth in online revenue)
- Increased revenue margin with accurate, targeted cross sell/upsell
- Superior customer experience through personalization at every touchpoint
- Proactive decision making based on detailed insights on the guests
Opportunity
The hotel chain wanted to be able to recognize guests as individuals and to connect this identification with intelligence about them. This would enable a secure and smarter experience for their guests. The client was looking to transform its existing business model to take advantage of omni-channel services in order to deliver personalized experiences to all its customers by identifying them and leveraging intelligence derived from their behavior. In pursuit of this objective, they wanted to augment their existing legacy mainframe system by leveraging a new generation robust application platform that could enable the business to deliver personalized response to customer touch points.
The limitations of their existing system
- Long time-to-market for new attributes, newer personalized offers on legacy system
- Storage of security, identity, preferences, rewards data in single data store
- Supported customers - not prospects
- Home grown customer de-duplication process
- Lack of marketing insights
The client also wanted to set up a unified customer view robust enough to scale up & integrate data from mergers and acquisitions (M&A).
Mindtree Approach
Mindtree created a platform that could integrate data from multiple sources like guest profile, guest integration data, 3rd party, analytics data etc. This centralized customer profile hub would help realize a unified view, preferences and subsequent enriched guest offerings across various channels of interactions. This platform would be able to capture intelligence around likes/dislikes, behavior across channels to acquire and retain loyal customers. It enabled the client to create a unique ‘Guest ID’ to identify individual customers and personalize consumer interactions across brands, channels and devices.
The solution strengthens customer identity & access management and supports the creation of progressively enriched consumer personas to serve personalization needs of guest services. This has allowed the business to recognize a customer as an individual at every touchpoint.
Technologies used
- IBM BigInsights platform,
- Datastax Enterprise edition (Cassandra),
- Play Framework – a reactive web application framework
Highlights of solution:
- Extended consumer identity management to support access and consent management
- Implemented consumer authentication against unique ‘Guest Id’ - identifies unauthenticated customers and prospects using 1st and 3rd party data
- Linked attributes & interactions to a customer identity in the channel of interaction to create customer “Master Profile”
- Performed analysis of customer profiles and their associated interactions
- Stores enriched consumer profile, progressively, and delivers in near real-time
- Implemented robust security and governance
- Implemented core consumer profile creation, operations process and support for recognized and authenticated customers
- APIs implemented to facilitate access and delivery of profile data
- Flexibility to add new attributes / interactions to support quick time-to-market
If you would like to learn more about this success story and know how we could make this possible for your Hospitality or Leisure company, write to us at info@mindtree.com
