Overview
“Re:infer enables us to hear every customer and plays a critical role in our customer-centricity strategy. With Re:infer we can continually improve our product, service and support to meet the demand of our customers.”
<small>Ben Blake, SVP & CMO, Hotels.com<small>
The challenges
The online travel and booking market is highly competitive, with a myriad of different options for consumers looking for their ideal holiday accommodation. Offering a platform that is responsive and tailored to the individual customer experience is integral to retention and revenue.
To build a better platform, you have to listen to your customers and respond to their feedback. However, Hotels.com was unable to keep up with the massive amounts of messages received. Every day, Hotels.com communicates with thousands of customers across more than 10 different channels - including email, chat, surveys, and phone calls - and in several languages. While the company had a dedicated customer experience team, it struggled to analyse and action all the messages received.
Hotels.com receives communications from over 50 million customers, in 41 different languages, across 10 distinct channels.
The solution
With message volumes increasing and so much valuable feedback going to waste, the Hotels.com team knew they were missing a valuable opportunity to understand and better serve customers. They realised that to provide a competitive customer experience, they needed a way to read every message in real-time, using the information they contained to understand customer behaviour and drive action.
Hotels.com decided to use the Re:infer Conversational Data Intelligence platform to rapidly extract customer and platform insights from their masses of customer feedback. Re:infer Communications Mining gives users the ability to visualise and quantify customer feedback - extracting the most important issues and opportunities for platform development from a single real-time dashboard.
Starting with its Customer Strategy and Experience team, Hotels.com has since rolled out the platform to 300+ users across Product Management, Brand Strategy, Content Marketing, Properties Management, and Customer Service. The teams use Re:infer daily to diagnose root cause issues from customer feedback.
The results
Re:infer has given teams unprecedented visibility into the challenges facing customers, and what they can do to resolve them. Hotels.com executives use data extracted by Re:Infer to inform product development, and the platform played a major role in guiding the business’s 2020 product strategy.
- Largest uptick in CLTV and return rate achieved
- Increased conversion and NPS, boosted customer loyalty
- Top 10 most common product issues identified
- Most popular customer requests discovered and put into production
- Weekly summary of management nsights from Re:infer shared with 200+ readers across Expedia Group
“I look at this, and I see opportunity.”
<small>Senior Hotels.com executive<small>
