“Personalisation isn’t a destination, it is a journey”

IN-DEPTH: LikeCube’s co-founder Eleanor Ford on personalisation in the travel industry

Published: 22 Sep 2010

IN-DEPTH: LikeCube’s co-founder Eleanor Ford on personalisation in the travel industry

There are so many channels through which a company can engage with its potential customers.

Considering the prowess of website, email and mobile channels, do they largely remain untapped in terms of personalisation?

LikeCube’s co-founder Eleanor Ford thinks so.

“Personalisation should be looked upon as a strategic journey with a marketing messaging that conveys the benefits for the user, that is relevance and time-saving. You know you will win when people will start referring to your service or brand as a "trusted advisor" or "trusted authority", or when they will bypass search engines to use your service. Reducing your reliance on SEO/SEM is one of the clear benefits of personalisation,” pointed out Ford, who is scheduled to speak at the forthcoming two-day Online Marketing and Social Media Strategies for Travel Summit Europe 2010 (5-6, October) to be held in Prague.

Ford spoke to EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta about personalisation in the travel industry.

What do you recommend when it comes to a thorough examination of any customer base: their intent, motivations, demographics and psychographics, geography, media consumption, as well as transactions?

Eleanor Ford:

We've been looking at the situation from a slightly different angle. Services that ask for a lot of user information upfront typically have higher bounce rates. So how can we learn something about you easily, lowering the barriers to entry?

Personally, when I travel, I intuitively tend to refer to two things to help filter the overload of information: my like-minded friends and my past experiences (e. g. places I have been to, that I might have reviewed, commented or checked in). I think these, with the searches I perform, are a bit more meaningful than demographics, while requiring less input from me. After all, isn't it easier to say "I want a hotel like this one" rather than "I want a hotel with a swimming pool, rather small, with a boutique feel and right for a romantic weekend and I'm 34, leave in London with a family"?

So LikeCube works primarily with this data and we advise our customers about its personalisation potential that can be used to infer your like-minded people and to compute places similarities. That way, we can use your past experiences to turn search into a personalised filter while succeeding in lowering the entry level for personalisation.

An expert earlier this year told me: one should be wary to make sure to focus on the difference between relevance and trying to create one-to-one marketing for the sake of creating a tactic. Experience has shown that organisations tend to look for a “plug and play” solution that never will adapt to existing business process of data collection or ongoing touch point management. What’s your viewpoint regarding the same?

Eleanor Ford:

This is a very relevant point. In our case, we advise our customers that personalisation isn't a destination, it is a journey.

The objective of a personalised recommendation solution should be first and foremost about creating trust. If a user gives you his time and engages in a one-to-one communication, then each recommendation given to that user is an opportunity to convert him into a booking but it also carries the risk of losing him if that recommendation isn't good. That's why we spend great effort on making sure that the LikeCube recommendations are of the highest relevance. Sometimes it also means that there might not be any personalised recommendations available at all, in which case we recommended to inform the user about it very transparently. This works well in our experience. For a business, it comes down to what they want but also the personalisation potential of the data they own. Our plug and play service can deliver great results, but we also differentiate in that we can create a number of truly bespoke turn-key solutions dependant on the level of customisation required.

A part of 1:1 experience is understanding how at different points of a brand relationship, different channels play better role at different times. How can the travel companies leverage this into their strategy?

Eleanor Ford:

There are many - too many - channels through which a company can engage with its potential future customers. For example, social media offers plenty of novel ways to enrich the 1:1 experiences. And that's not even counting with mobiles and location based services which can reach you at the point of interest.

But I think the website, email and mobile channels remain largely untapped in terms of personalisation and that this is a logical and fruitful first step. Personalisation should be looked at as a strategic journey with a marketing messaging that conveys the benefits for the user, that is relevance and time-saving. You know you will win when people will start referring to your service or brand as a "trusted advisor" or "trusted authority", or when they will bypass search engines to use your service. Reducing your reliance on SEO/SEM is one of the clear benefits of personalisation.

Recently, a senior OTA executive told me: No travel service knows me well enough yet to make algorithmically driven (when on search engines) suggestions that would be correct a high percentage of the time. Of course, part of the issue is many people don’t want to have all of their interests, history, etc. accessible by businesses. The privacy issue is an interesting one as we all want personalised service but are reluctant at times to provide the personal data that is needed to create such a service. How do you assess the situation?

Eleanor Ford:

The lack of data about users is a real issue for the travel industry as the average person books a hotel only just a few times a year. However, a few past experiences are great data points that can be used. We are addressing this lack of data with an innovative cold start solution, which leverages semantics to compute similarities not only between people but also between places. This allows for example an anonymous user to use his past experience in a simple way and say "I liked this hotel in London, where should I go in New York?" and get a personalised result. This solution offers very interesting benefits as every user that has booked and rated positively at least one place can benefit from it, further lowering the entry level to personalisation.

We also advise to look at the social media platforms to leverage other types of data, like reviews, likes and check-ins. One shouldn't look at its service as a closed platform.

Regarding the issue of privacy, I think this is likely to reduce over time as the perceived value we get from the personalised services will increase. There is still much improvement to be done in this space, including simply on how solutions are presented (too many make the mistake of overselling its benefits, setting themselves for failure), but we are making progress. As an example, one of our customers, the leading European local business review site www.qype.com, with over 16 millions monthly unique visitors, allows its users to choose between top rated and personalised recommendation powered by LikeCube. The recommendations came with easy to understand explanations. Users with as little as three reviews are able to get fully personalised recommendations while anonymous users could still benefits from places similarities computed by our service. Qype also invited its users to publicly share their first impressions about the quality of the service, a great way to get genuine feedback. Some even qualified the recommendations as quite spooky, bang on the money and an incentive to join.

What role does/could social media play in customer profiling? How can you make best use of the information?

Eleanor Ford:

Social media, from a personalisation potential point of view, can be of great use. As a user, I want to know if some of my like-minded Facebook friends have been to places I'm considering. As a business, we want to leverage the social graph, so that your taste neighbours who are also friends have a higher weight in the recommendations. We also want to use social media content which can contain additional useful information, like check-ins at specific locations, ratings and also reviews or simple comments about a place and its service. There are many opportunities as the social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Qype, Foursquare) evolve and make their info more open through their API.

Which customer touch points will be key in 2010 and beyond?

Eleanor Ford:

We are seeing a significant shift in the way people access information. Mobile and tablets are clearly the future touch points, as they can reach people where they are. However it is important to take into account that these, primarily based on apps, are semi-closed platforms. What this means for the editors and publishers is that search engines can't crawl the content the apps contain, therefore changing the way people reach the service in the first place. This, combined with the limited screen estate available to mobile apps, means that personalisation will play an even more important role in making one's service stand out from the hundred of others available in the app stores.

Online Marketing and Social Media Strategies for Travel Summit Europe 2010

LikeCube’s co-founder Eleanor Ford is scheduled to speak at the forthcoming two-day Online Marketing and Social Media Strategies for Travel Summit Europe 2010 (5-6, October) to be held in Prague.

For more information, click here

Or contact:

Gina Baillie
VP Global Marketing & Events
EyeforTravel
London, UK: +44 (0)207 375 7197
gina@eyefortravel.com

 
 
 

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