Customer loyalty metrics are great, but brands must stay on top of them to fully understand and leverage them properly to enhance future communications.
Enter Global Hotel Alliance.
Global Hotel Alliance is always in tune with its loyalty marketing efforts, from its loyalty program to its laser customer-centric approach, and to leveraging insights from its Voice of the Customer program.
Kristi Gole, Director of Loyalty Marketing for Global Hotel Alliance, explained to Loyalty360 how GHA leverages its loyalty metrics.
“For direct customer feedback, we leverage qualitative insight from focus groups in key markets, and we offer a monthly survey through our Account Summary e-newsletter, asking members to tell us how we are doing,” Gole said. “We also track customer contact center comments and share internally across departments on a monthly basis. And we openly receive suggestions and feedback from our hotel staff through a co-creation community, based on their direct experience with guests. For indirect customer response, we closely monitor email engagement metrics (opens, clicks, opt-outs) and conversion (bookings or award redemption) and test frequency, timing, design & layout, and content to see what members respond to best, then tailor their future communications accordingly. We track these metrics on a weekly basis and shift direction as quickly as the following week, if needed. We also incorporate an A/B test on almost every. We test the same elements two to three times before making conclusions.”
GHA has developed a sophisticated datamart with over 123 fields which are used to populate dynamic, personalized communications to members across its digital channels, providing respectful and relevant messaging, ensuring that all direct marketing to our members has personalized elements incorporated.
GHA’s global loyalty program, DISCOVERY, has grown rapidly in just six years.
“We have made significant investment on the back end to scale our infrastructure to support this growth, and to ensure that we continue to deliver a quality experience for our members,” Gole added. “Each week, we roll out enhancements on our website (some visible, some less obvious), create new exclusive promotions, create inspiring travel content for our emails and social media sites, and work closely with our brands to measure and improve the member experience at hotel level.”
Last year, GHA rebranded to simplify the program: From GHA Discovery to simply DISCOVERY.
“We launched a new DiscoveryLoyalty.com website as well as a luxury-focused UltratravelCollection.com website to make it easier for members to manage their account, redeem awards, and book with us,” Gole explained. “We added new brands and new hotels to expand our portfolio, offering greater choice to our members. And we began investing significantly in new technology developments to automate and streamline complex processes, as well as prepare for future innovation. Our strategy has been, from loyalty program launch to present, to ask our members what they want from our program and to adjust in response to their feedback and/or their behavior. We modify program basics such as rewards, tier qualification criteria (public and discretionary), and benefits as well as our marketing communication frequency, design, and content all based on their responses.
Our organization is structured in a way that puts each associate on our lean team in close contact to customer response, either directly with survey responses saved in a shared folder and member comments forwarded from our call center, or through reports and analysis to see behavior. When a proposal or request is made that serves internal (operational or political) drivers, we weigh that against customer response and make decisions based off of that understanding.”
GHA employees are all accountable for the same program metrics across channels that result from positive customer relationships: Email subscriber count (minimizing opt-outs), engagement on website, repeat stays and conversion, award redemption, and member recognition and program delivery at hotel level.
“Every branding decision, benefit or award enhancement, system release, campaign, and approach involves discussion over the customer and what will best serve him/her,” Gole added. “This helps prioritize the dozens of desired investments and projects, weighing customer-benefiting features above internal operational desires, and results in improved customer relationships that bring program and revenue growth.”