Excerpt from FastCompany
When travel began picking up again several months into the pandemic, the hospitality industry breathed a collective sigh of relief. Not every brand in the industry went back to business as usual, though. Marriott, for one, saw an opportunity. Leisure travel was on the rise, and many customers who once traveled mostly for work were now taking longer trips that combined business with leisure. To meet the shifting needs of its customers, the company had to embrace new tactics.
“Coming out of the pandemic, we had formulated a lot of strong ideas about how to capture the increasingly fluid nature of business and leisure travel,” says Chris Norton, senior vice president, marketing channels and optimization, at Marriott. “But we needed a partner with a mix of the right assets, tools, customer intelligence, and boots on the ground to help us bring our ideas to life.”
That partner was Epsilon, a global advertising and marketing technology company that has been helping Marriott manage its outbound marketing communications for more than a decade. “We feel like we are an extension of the Marriott team,” says Lisa Henderson, managing director of client services at Epsilon. “It’s very much a partnership.”
In the early days of the collaboration, which began in 2008, Epsilon’s sole focus was on providing Marriott with an email technology solution and helping with the company’s messaging strategy. “It was an important relationship, but somewhat tactical,” Henderson says. “Today, we are working together in a much more collaborative way to support the entire customer experience.”
The evolution of the companies’ relationship coincided with a shift in the ways travelers were interacting with hospitality companies. The rise of social media and personal devices created a need for a coordinated omnichannel marketing strategy that enabled communication with guests at the right time, on the right channel, with a message that was relevant to their demonstrated preferences.
“At first, we didn’t always successfully coordinate what we were saying in one channel with what we were saying in another, and that created a somewhat fragmented customer experience,” Norton says. “Now, we’re speaking with a consistent voice across our channels.”
Epsilon’s PeopleCloud solution plays a significant role in Marriott’s omnichannel strategy. The AI-powered technology allows clients to better recognize their customers when they interact at different touchpoints and channels. This allows clients to extend their knowledge of their customers by better using what they know about them while maintaining privacy throughout a wide set of interactions. For Marriott, that means if a guest has shared certain preferences—for example, the times when they prefer to be contacted, or information about specific interests—they’ll now receive communications reflecting those preferences, no matter which channel they’re using.
Marriott is now able to stay in touch with guests throughout their customer journeys. If a guest has looked at rooms without booking, they might receive an email message gently rekindling their interest. Meanwhile, guests who have completed a booking might receive information about restaurants and activities near where they’ll be staying.
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