Travelers have grown accustomed to seeing significant improvements in their online shopping experience. Yet travel and hospitality industry has been slow in adapting this pattern. In recent years, we’re seeing this trend changing slowly. Industry experts predict that 2016 may prove to be a breakout year for travel and hospitality companies in terms of providing personalized customer experience across all channels.
Customers from a wide variety of sources create mountains of structured and unstructured data, and the number and variety of sources continue to increase. Digitization of customer activities, aided by plethora of mobile apps, online channels and devices is generating a massive digital exhaust as well. The challenge is harnessing this data to derive actionable insights from the noise. It is highly impossible to analyze this data with out the application of Big Data and Analytics technologies.
The good news is Big Data and Analytics technologies are not only maturing, but also consumption and deployment patterns are getting lot easier with the innovation from cloud development platforms such as IBM’s Bluemix, Microsoft Azure, Salesfore App Cloud and others. This allows travel and hospitality companies to try and test big data and analytics use cases by developing quick agile solutions prototypes without making a dent in their CapEx wallet. It allows them to pilot the results in a targeted manner as well.
Travel and Hospitality organizations have started to adopt foundational analytics capabilities. Creating robust segmentation models to develop actionable clusters of customers is just the starting point. Behavior attribution models can certainly help to an extent for targeted marketing. However, Cognitive and Predictive analytics can play a significant role in isolating relevant signals from the noise to understand the likely behavior of the individual and to elevate the overall customer experience resulting in improved customer satisfaction and business metrics.
Evolution of Cognitive technologies
Cognitive technologies have improved dramatically in recent years. From machine learning, natural language processing (NLP) and speech recognition, it now can extract visual insights from a collection of customer images from Instagram or Facebook collections. Travel and hospitality companies can now leverage these visual cues to enrich the customer 360 profile by incorporating insights from individual’s image collections in the form of preferred travel destinations, interests, places and leisure activities.
Psycholinguistics analytics – another Cognitive technology can now shed light on individual’s preferences and personality traits by analyzing the psychology of language and other attributes from individual’s twitter feed. According to a study published in National Academy of Sciences journal, computer-based personality judgements are more accurate than those made by humans. It further empowers travel and hospitality companies to personalize communications and connect with customers across all channels.
Mass customization is morphing into Mass personalization
Mass customization was originally associated with manufacturing consumer products tailored to the requirements of the individual and has evolved to include personalized marketing, customer service, and a host of service offerings for consumers. Digitization of personal and business activities, enabled by apps and devices that track both active and passive actions, now generates a massive trail of digital exhaust in the form of big data. Efforts to analyze this big data will begin to yield more sophisticated personalized experience, which will turn into automated mass personalization for travel, hospitality and other consumer businesses.
In Summary
As travel and hospitality companies increasingly adopt advances in Big Data analytics technologies, as device sophistication evolves and improves, and as individuals increasingly utilize mobile apps and devices that generate ever more digitized personal information, the field of personalized analytics will evolve in turn. Industry experts predict that 2016 may prove to be a breakout year for this trend, as cognitive and predictive analytics becomes more widely adopted as a scalable, operational capability in travel and hospitality organizations. Personalized analytics is about to get a lot more personalized — and valuable for individuals and travel providers.
Srini Kasthoori 