There are obvious clues that help travel brands discern whether someone is traveling for business or pleasure. A traveler’s attire, a set of golf clubs and the presence of family members are key giveaways. But for data-driven travel and hospitality brands with a financial incentive to provide personalized, omnichannel experiences throughout each customer journey and across the customer lifecycle, educated guesses are not the same as a deep, personal understanding that drives revenue.
According to a recent Dynata survey commissioned by Redpoint, 39 percent of customers said that personalization has not been achieved by most travel brands. Communication challenges and logistical issues were cited as the main sources of dissatisfaction, resulting in disengaged customers. According to SmarterHQ, 72 percent of customers will only engage with messages tailored to their interests.
To meet the expectation for personalization, many travel brands are in the process of selecting customer data platforms (CDPs). With revenue closely tied to loyalty, retention and customer lifetime value (CLV), hyper-personalizing every customer engagement demonstrates to customers that a travel brand respects and honors their preferences, and is using first-party data to enhance the omnichannel experience.
This article will explore a CDP use case for a travel brand, and detail how the Redpoint CDP differs from other vendors in how it perfects first-party data, a key requirement for providing omnichannel personalization in the cadence of the customer.
Stay Relevant Amid a Data Influx
In correctly identifying a type of traveler, business vs. pleasure barely scratches the surface for the level of granularity a travel brand must reach to deliver a personalized CX. Is the customer an employee of a business partner? How many bookings has the customer made in the last six months? Do they have a rewards account? What is their loyalty status? Is the customer in the high-net worth segment? What is their vacation travel propensity score, and what recent actions have they taken to influence this score? How many active campaigns or journeys is the customer in that are marked with a priority score of more than 1.5? Or, in an emerging trend, is the customer a “set-jetter,” taking off for exotic destinations made popular by TV shows such as “White Lotus” and “Emily in Paris.”
A customer’s profile changes by the second, in other words, and delivering relevance in the cadence of a customer’s journey requires a brand to make decisions based on a real-time, persistently updated, unified customer profile.
Consider for example a customer who books a Los Angeles hotel room on an employee travel portal for travel the following day. She is placed in a partner business traveler segment. After she places a room service phone order late that night, she is selected to take a survey as a high lifetime value (CLV) customer, even though most of that rating is through leisure travel with her family. Because of the order and her CLV, there is a trigger to send an SMS with an offer for 400 loyalty points if she rates her ordering experience – with a condition to suppress any other message in the business traveler segment for that evening. The rating, and any text natural language processing analysis, are immediately appended to her unified profile. One week later, she uses a personal computer to book a room for four at a property in New Orleans. Although this trip is labeled “leisure,” all data from the previous travel is applied to help guide personalized interactions.
Comprehensive Data Ingest, Processing and Unification
Reconciling multiple travel portfolios into a unified profile or Golden Record with perfected first-party data to create a seamless omnichannel experience is a strength of the Redpoint rg1 platform. Importantly, rg1 completes all data transformations and identity resolution at ingestion, ensuring that a Golden Record is updated and actionable the moment of each customer interaction.
The Redpoint CDP provides comprehensive raw data ingest, processing and unification on a continuous basis to create a 360-degree view of prospects and customers that, like customers themselves, is a living, breathing representation of the data from every possible source.
With this dynamic view, marketers create sophisticated dynamic segments that (like the room service example) involve real-time interactions, interaction combinations over time, customer modeling and persistent customer attributes. Diverse segments support triggered activity and are also available and accessible to all front-line engagement platforms in an open garden architecture.
The Redpoint CDP supports travel and hospitality companies executing next-best actions in milliseconds at scale, integrating seamlessly with any combination of inbound and outbound customer engagement environments.
Golden Record vs. Unified View
A key distinction between the Redpoint Golden Record and what many vendors label a unified profile is that the former – by completing data quality processes at the moment data is ingested – is far more trustworthy and accurate than a CDP that puts off transformations downstream.
If a unified profile refers to integrating data from multiple sources, with the assumption that this integrated view already possesses relevant keys, the view will only be as up-to-date as the recency of the oldest data.
The Redpoint Golden Record guarantees accuracy. A true unified customer profile, the Golden Record provides brands and marketers with a customer identity graph that encapsulates a persistently updated view of a unique customer or household’s behaviors, preferences, transactions, devices and IDs. The Golden Record is a single source of the truth for the customer because it is continually updated as a journey unfolds. And because it uses persistent keys, it provides a contextual understanding of an individual customer that deepens over time, layering meaning with every new customer behavior.
An Accurate, Complete and Up-to-Date View
The use of persistent keys is a key component in creating a master customer record, but that in turn requires that every customer signal is correctly matched, merged and attached to the proper record, as the data is sourced. That is where Redpoint’s advanced identity resolution capabilities come into play.
Using probabilistic and deterministic matching, Redpoint finds, cleans, matches, merges and relates every disparate signal about a customer to produce an accurate, complete and up-to-date view of a customer. Identity resolution also effectively links individuals into a household or other entity (such as a business) that a brand wishes to engage with.
Thus, even with a continual influx of new data or new or different customer identifiers such as a new address, email, marriage or other lifestyle change, the Redpoint Golden Record is always in the context and cadence of a customer journey and is the foundation for delivering real-time, omnichannel personalized experiences.
Consider our Los Angeles business traveler who orders room service. Perhaps she registers a complaint that evening because her steak wasn’t as rare as she had specified. A day later, after checking out, she contacts the call center about a lost item. Based on the caller ID, the agent knows immediately that the caller is a high-value customer who is 5,000 points shy of the next loyalty tier, and that she has logged a recent complaint. The agent proactively apologizes for the dinner mishap, and rewards the customer by moving her to the higher loyalty tier. When she accepts the offer, the agent is instructed to pull a different promotion that had been queued for the end of that conversation. Real-time decisioning in Redpoint enable this type of seamless interaction based on the totality of the customer’s experiences with the brand, where a next-best action is in the context of the journey and relevant for a specific travel portfolio.
With the Redpoint Golden Record, a brand is never caught off guard. A hotel or airline desk clerk, a concierge, a marketer – everyone who interacts directly or indirectly with a customer is in tune with the customer across an omnichannel journey.
For more on how Redpoint helps travel marketers navigate even the most complex customer journeys with highly personalized experiences across every stage and touchpoint, click here.
