A leading travel company sought to revitalise its partner rewards programme. After experiencing significant disruptions in global travel from 2020 to 2022, the company noticed a sharp decline in engagement, with fewer active participants and lower levels of loyalty among the programme.
As a result, their existing rewards programme was struggling to deliver the value expected and as such, needed a more modern, data driven approach to customer experience and personalisation.
The company faced challenges with data collection and management, marketing technology architecture, segmentation, and a structured communication strategy. The marketing technology platforms lacked a cohesive structure, with multiple disparate platforms and systems that made it difficult to track customer data or run personalised marketing campaigns.
Recognising the need for change, the company approached us to help them with their a customer data strategy, revise their marketing technology ecosystem and develop a customer engagement strategy using the latest data science and machine learning techniques.
Our work speaks for itself.Revitalising Customer Engagement Through Data Science, Strategy & Marketing Technology
Transform | Innovate | Grow | Data Science | Segmentation | Strategy | Salesforce | Integration | Customer Engagement
The Problem
The company faced several critical issues:
Declining Engagement: The global travel disruptions of the pandemic caused a decline in agent engagement and a reduction in active participants. The company lacked insight into which agents were the most valuable and how to properly engage them.
Disparate Marketing Technology: The company’s marketing technology platforms were underutilised, fragmented and lacked integration. This impacted the quality of its first party data collection - and the ability to track agents' behaviours, develop insights on their customers and activate it for personalised communications.
Inefficient Data Management: Along side the marketing technology issues was a lack of a customer data strategy. Whilst inconsistent first party data was being collection, the poorly structured database resulted in a limited ability to run personalisation programmes.
Lack of Targeted Segmentation: The company had limited knowledge of agents' preferences, claiming behaviours, transaction patterns and product mixes. Without this, it was difficult to know where to focus their efforts, run segmentations or personalised engagement strategies.
To overcome these challenges, the company needed to fundamentally rethink their marketing technology and data strategy, to enable them to deliver a more robust rewards engagement progamme.
For the travel company to see results, it was essential that they adopted the new strategies and embraced the integrated technology system. We encouraged leadership to fully implement the data-driven segmentation framework, use the newly integrated platforms for more personalised agent engagement, and refine their communication strategies based on real-time data.
The Solution
-
With the limited data available, we began by conducting a comprehensive audit of the existing agent database, which spanned six years of transaction and engagement data. This included the first party analysis of transaction patterns, agent engagement levels, and booking and claiming behaviours. We utilised machine learning clustering models to identify distinct agent segments, allowing us to create an actionable segmentation framework based on recency, frequency and value of bookings. We then overlayed what rewards data we had available to understand behavioural patterns. To add depth, we supplemented the analysis with additional research to understand the underlying motivations and attitudes of each segment.
-
With the agent segments identified, we then developed a personalisation programme tailored to each segment and unique characteristics. This phase focused on developing tactical recommendations to address the specific needs of each group, enabling more personalised communication, rewards strategies, and prioritisation of agent engagement efforts.
-
In the final phase, we designed a technology blueprint to improve first party data management and communication capabilities. The company’s disparate systems were integrated to create a single customer view in the CRM, allowing the travel company to track agent activity, activate personalised communications, and monitor performance more effectively. We integrated the existing CRM and martech platforms, incorporating live segmentation tagging and periodic methodology reviews to ensure continuous optimisation of the rewards programme.
Outcomes
The results of this transformation were immediate and impactful:
Optimised Marketing Technology & Data Foundations
The integration of the company’s CRM, rewards, and martech platforms created a unified system that allowed for real-time tracking of agent behaviours and seamless communication. The introduction of live segmentation tagging would ensure that the company could continuously refine their engagement strategies based on evolving agent preferences and market conditions.
Data-Driven Insights for Personalised
The segmentation analysis revealed nine distinct agent segments with varying characteristics, behaviours and engagement levels. We identified key segments contributing significantly to revenue, as well as those requiring targeted interventions, enabling the company to tailor incentive programmes that resonated with each segment. This personalisation enhanced agent loyalty and improved programme participation.
Improved Engagement & Retention
The personalisation strategies enabled the company to focus marketing and sales resources resources on high-potential segments, while also engaging underperforming segments with tailored communications and product
Increased Revenue
The segmentation analysis showed that less than 10% of agents were responsible for over 40% of revenue, highlighting the importance of these high-value partners. With targeted engagement efforts, the company could prioritise these agents, ultimately driving revenue growth.
Future Proofing
With the integrated technology and data-driven engagement strategies in place, the company was poised for sustainable growth. The segmentation framework provided a solid foundation on which all future marketing and engagement strategies could be built, optimised, and scaled.
This case study highlights the importance of having a strong first party data foundation and marketing technology ecosystem. Whilst a behavioural anaylsis segmentation was possible, it could have been richer if the foundations were in place already, and their ability to activate it across channels was limited without rethinking the foundations.
However, the transformative impact of data-driven segmentation to revitalise the partner rewards programme was significant. By understanding each agents value, the company was able to personalise engagement strategies and optimise technology systems, to drive higher retention, stronger relationships, and increased revenue. The integrated approach replaced generic, one-size-fits-all methods with precision marketing tactics, positioning the company to maximise returns on their partner investments and build stronger, more loyal partnerships.