Travel marketers have to dig deep and ask themselves some very meaningful questions if they want to capitalise on the power of big data in the CRM arena. As EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta discovers, it is clear that entities need not be driven by ‘big data’ for its own sake, but by answering specific, tactical questions.

The travel industry has been trying to work out ways to capitalise on benefits that big data can bring to CRM. 

At this juncture, the potential definitely calls for a stronger assessment. But being specific with what is required and how to do it isn’t easy. It’s one thing to know things about your customers, and another to be able to act on this knowledge to improve conversion and/or the transaction value.

There are more tools to bring customer data to bear on each customer interaction at each point of sale than there were even a year ago, says Jonathan Isernhagen, director of marketing analysis, Travelocity.

There’s a movement towards consolidation into comprehensive tool suites, so your call centre agents know what the person they’re speaking with has shopped for on the site and vice versa. You can tell which digital marketing channel drove shoppers to the call centre by virtue of which phone number they called. “Done incorrectly, CRM is creepy. Done correctly, it makes your company seem like a trusted and knowledgeable friend, not pushy but full of helpful suggestions,” he says.

As for CRM and big data, the reality is still very different. Most companies have not yet figured out how to truly distil insights from big data and apply those insights to meaningfully impact their customers’ experience. 

“Put bluntly, there’s big data – dealing with velocity, variability and volume of data from a technology standpoint – and there’s CRM – bringing science and art to customer engagement. And right now, they’re not well connected. So, as it stands today, the conversation is interesting, but in practice the actual merging of the two capabilities is in its infancy,” says David Danziger, senior director, digital data solutions, Merkle.

Staying away from hype

According to Isernhagen it’s easy to get caught up in the hype. As a front-line marketer, he suggests that one should ask these questions:

1)      What marketing data must I have in order to make optimal marketing decisions? Which customer data would my dream list contain?

2)      Of these, what data does my existing data warehouse provide?

3)      What marketing questions and questions about shopper behaviour have I asked over the years but had been told ‘we don’t store that’ or ‘that’s not practical?’ Now is the time to dust off those ideas and give them a second look. Be propelled not by ‘big data’ for its own sake, but by specific, tactical questions that you need to answer, and that will enable vendors and other experts to provide you with useful answers.

Look to the latest trends

The latest trends that are central to unlocking value are analytics and connection, says Danziger. He says that each plays an important role, and improving in one area strengthens the other. He explains further:

-          If we start with analytics, one of the biggest challenges that companies face is making sense of the all the data. When it comes right down to it, companies have been investing over the last decade in order to capture data.  They recognised that having the data is meaningful. However, applying the analytics that are necessary to translate data into actionable insights is a different skillset requiring different people and different technologies. So focusing data scientists and technologies around analytics is one key trend. 

-          The other key trend is about connection ie: pulling together the data, systems, and learnings – from both outbound and inbound interactions with customers in all media and channels – so that analytics can be applied holistically and consistently. It is still very common to conduct CRM in silos.  Connected CRM, which enables companies to optimise engagement at all times across media and channels, is the next major trend to emerge. 

These two trends – analytics and connection – reinforce each other as well. As companies continue to refine their analytic prowess, they will sharpen their ability to market to, engage with, and provide service to customers. And as companies improve upon their ability to connect their competencies across channels, the data available for analysis will be more complete. This, in turn, will lead to better insights. So these two trends feed into each other quite nicely, says Danziger.

Talking of unlocking the value of big data in CRM, Isernhagen says currently specialists are packing all the data away and then parsing it at leisure. “When you’re using a traditional relational database, a tremendous amount of effort is spent organising and loading only the obviously-valuable data so you can execute all kinds of queries quickly and reliably,” he says.

Importantly, Isernhagen says that the cheapness of big data storage lets you keep everything: impressions and clicks, detailed shopping data, going back for years, then use various algorithms to detect non-obvious correlations that your CRM architecture can act upon. Your most-valuable or least-valuable customers may have some unusual characteristic in common, which could influence the content and quantity of ads that they see.

Assessing maturity levels

Danziger says it’s important to assess the maturity for enterprise-level CRM, and low-level maturity is characterised by tendencies that include:

-          Data in disparate silos, not organised in a customer-centric fashion

-          Little to no capability or investment in systematic data quality

-          No connection between digital, direct, or offline sources of data

-          No investment in outside, descriptive data to augment customer data

-          No customer analytics and no segmentation strategy

-          Organisational structure itself not aligned around customers

-          No standard metrics in place to accurately attribute results from marketing across media and channels

-          ‘Accidental architecture’ with ad hoc technology decisions in different departments

If these represent extremes at the negative end of the spectrum, the positive end of the spectrum looks like the opposite, explains Danziger. And by definition, these involve integrating data management with disciplines around CRM to make it happen. Here is what it could look like.

-          An integrated data model, linked across media and channels and organised around the customer

-          A disciplined approach to data quality and ongoing hygiene needs, as well as investment in outside data to round out the ‘unknowns’ in customer and prospect data

-          Deeply embedded and distributed analytics enabling insights to support and inform every engagement with a customer or prospect

-          Organisational structure that supports and enables customer centricity

-          Robust attribution, informing marketing spend decisions at strategic, enterprise levels as well as tactical engagement levels

-          Well-defined and integrated architecture, enabling the right information at the right times with long-term scalability in mind

“The distance between the low-maturity and high-maturity is tremendous,” states Danziger. Most travel companies and indeed most companies in general, are still on the lower end of the maturity scale on the majority of these dimensions.