3 Ways to Master the Guest Experience with Personalization
People travel to enjoy new experiences, relax, and sometimes, indulge in a little much- deserved luxury. Not surprisingly, their expectations for frictionless experiences are high and start before they have even booked their trip.
It’s a high bar for travel and hospitality brands to meet, and many are falling short. In Adobe’s 2021 Digital Trends: Travel and Hospitality in Focus report, travel and hospitality respondents agreed that their customers’ expectations exceed their current digital capabilities.
The travel leaders that are meeting customers’ high bar have one thing in common: they all have a martech personalization engine in place to help them deliver memorable and relevant experiences customers are seeking. For the rest of the industry, it’s time to catch up.
Here is how your travel and hospitality brand can put the pieces in places to meet and exceed customer expectations:
- Strategy: Build a roadmap across people, processes, and technologies as a first step in delivering personalized engagement.
- Agility: Make sure your brand can react rapidly to shifts and changes in consumer behavior. This has become more important than ever since the pandemic, as it seems almost every day brings a new set of rules around how to navigate the travel experience safely.
- Integrate: Evaluate legacy technology and understand to what extent it is limiting your firm’s ability to deliver personalized experiences.
Typically, travel and hospitality firms’ tech stacks are a complex mix of new and mature technology solutions and internal and external products with few dedicated technology administrators to oversee them all. Getting to an omnichannel personalization engine that runs like a champ takes connecting historically disparate systems and a renewed focus on all the processes and interactions that impact the customer experience.
When assessing your martech stack, you’ll want to evaluate the core elements critical to personalization infrastructure: data, content, and delivery technology.
Let’s take a look at what’s needed in each of these areas.
Data
When it comes to delivering personalized experiences, data is where it’s at. The only way to ensure you are delivering relevant content is if you know your customers inside and out (aka online and offline). By bringing together data from all of your data sources—online, offline, internal and external—you can create a unified view of your customer.
This means travel and hospitality brands need to focus on direct interactions across digital and face-to-face channels as well as the operational elements often invisible to the consumer. For example, optimizing a travel experience requires combining their digital behaviors, such as what types of vacation packages they’ve bought online, with their in- person behaviors, such as what kinds of services they book at your hotel. This will give you the greatest insight into what promotions will resonate most—a free offer for a facial in your day spa, nine-holes on your golf course or an extra night stay.
With the Adobe real-time customer data platform (CDP), you can integrate data from all customer touchpoints, such as your CRM and loyalty programs as well as unknown user data like web searches, ad clicks and device ID. Using identity resolution, Adobe lets you create detailed, real-time customer identities that can then be used for personalization and segmentation, and activated across channels, in real-time and at scale.
Content
With a holistic view of your customer, you can create content that is relevant and right for every customer. Because nothing exceeds expectations like accurately predicting what your customers need before they even know they need it.
A robust content management solution, like Adobe Experience Manager, allows you to create content at speed through easy drag-and-drop features that don’t require IT’s help. It also helps by offering templates and content fragments that make it faster and easier to create multiple variations of the same content for different audience segments. For instance, you may want your home page web banner to display different travel package options based on different audience segments that visit your site.
Delivery
Great content is only great if it is delivered to the right customer through the right channel at the right time.
Adobe Workfront, combined with a powerful content management system, like Adobe Experience Manager, makes it possible for you to deliver content to market faster and more efficiently. For instance, you can test whether customers are responding better to an email or social media campaign—and even which types of customers respond best to which channel, so that you can further refine and optimize campaigns in the future.
About LeapPoint
LeapPoint Consulting is changing the way companies connect work, technology, and talent to solve big business challenges and drive successful outcomes. Established by Big 4 alumni who sought more flexibility and agility in meeting clients’ most critical business needs, LeapPoint is committed to making life and experiences fundamentally better for employees, customers and those they serve. As the go-to Adobe and Adobe Workfront partner in travel and hospitality and across industries, LeapPoint’s break-through Connected WorkTM services are the essential framework for the Future of Work. To learn more about LeapPoint and its Connected Work services, visit www.leappoint.com.
