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Covid-19 had an adverse effect on the global economy, and most companies worldwide either lost their business or are still thriving with great resilience. The companies in the retail, travel, and hospitality segment are no exception. These industries have endured the repercussions of the pandemic and have managed to sustain by adopting new-age technologies. The technology solutions have helped them sustain and are also providing them with a competitive advantage.
Artificial Intelligence and Digitalization are creating new waves of change across industries and empowering them to meet customers’ ever-changing expectations. Customer 360 – an Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled analytic framework, aids companies to efficiently create a workflow best-suited for their customer requirements, facilitating enriched customer experience.
Market Scenario
The market landscape of each segment, from retail, travel to hospitality, showcases significant disparities. While the retail market is booming, the travel and hospitality sector is yet to embark on growth.
Industries like: travel and hospitality are still facing the brunt of the pandemic, and there’s significant disruption in ensuing safety measures in international and domestic travel. Also, hotels, resorts, home-shaping platforms like Airbnb have faced a considerable jolt. While these industries are recuperating, polishing their work structure will help them build greater resilience and stability, putting them on the growth path.
According to recent studies, about the retail sector, in 2019, the global sales generated by the retail market were approximately $25 trillion, with a forecast to reach $27 trillion by 2022. The retail market is flourishing – whether it is physical, in-store retail, or online retailing/e-commerce channels. One of the core reasons is that retailers are constantly fine-tuning their daily operations using digitalization and new-age technologies. Gaining insights and analytics helped them drive a better consumer experience which opened up new business opportunities.
Customer 360
The advent of intelligent technologies like Customer 360 caters to the needs of the modern-day customer, enabling them to connect with brands and have instant access to informative content through multiple channels. These channels include mobile apps, customer support, online communities, social media marketing, and many more. Such customer-relevant data can be processed and analyzed to personalize the customer experience in real-time.
The success driver for any service organization is the customer happiness index. Service providers in retail, travel, and hospitality can stand out by combining customer interaction footprints through all channels. With a 360-degree view of customers, service providers can offer personalized services best suited for their customers, augmenting their overall experience.
Customer 360 Benefits
Today, it has become challenging for most industries to meet the demands of the widely scattered customers -geographically and demographically. While most companies have opted for digitalization into their workflow, how to drive value from it still remains the big question. It is important for companies to understand their digitization capabilities, and implementing the same in their operations shall empower them with better analytical tools, reduce their costs, and expand their businesses.
Companies now have huge customer interaction with them, thanks to digitalization. With customer 360, it’s easier for companies to segregate their customers into different categories by analyzing their patterns, purchase behavior, social media interactions, interests and geographies, and ancillary sales.
Customer 360 in Retail Sector:
Retail brands are constantly looking to boost their marketing KPIs and enrich customer experiences. However, they face challenges like dealing with various data sources and disparate systems, making it difficult to create and manage a centralized index of records.
With customer 360, brands are now able to connect with external systems for new analytics and have access to master customer product data. Brands are enabled with a clear and single view of the customer. Customer 360 allows an automated combination of integrated workflow capabilities, and companies can now improve cross-team collaboration and understand relevant data to use. Useful information such as customers’ profiles, preferences, different transactions, and their relationships with other suppliers empowers them to develop innovative marketing and advertising strategies enabling growth. For example:
Customer 360 enhances FMCG retail’s merchandising and marketing activities and provides a single view of the product, pricing, and promotions. A digital analytic assistant offers customers with latest trends in aspects of grocery and hard goods. It also provides predictive analytics, which proves beneficial for future actions to be taken. With alerts and notifications about the latest events and customer behavior patterns, retailers can scale their businesses.
Customer 360 Driving Business
Customer 360 also provides the Next Best Offer analytics, which uses predictive analytics to identify the product or services that the customer needs. This data helps to add an extra dash of personalization to the customer’s experience. Customer 360 helps retain the loyalty of customers and stitches together an offer that meets their requirements.
IGT Solutions provides Customer 360- Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled analytics that aids companies to understand their customer profiles, purchase behavior, customer engagements, and preferences with Customer 360 intelligence. This technology’s vast suite of features facilitates the unique identification of customers, situations, and decision-making propensities, enabling contextual and actionable recommendations to drive the subsequent optimal outcome.
Companies can leverage IGT’s Customer 360 to deliver hyper-personalized services to their customers. The framework identifies and segregates different areas of personalization under ‘NORC’, ensuring that valuable insights are extracted from the enormous data volumes NORC is related to the travel sector.
Customer 360 in Travel:
Travel companies can now eliminate silos with the help of Customer 360 and effectively manage their online and offline interactions. These companies are now capable of interacting seamlessly with their customers using real-time communication. For example:
Airline companies are now enabling customers to interact with them across multiple channels, providing them with ease of use and flexibility. Customers can directly call or use apps and social media to make reservations and raise queries or complaints. In case of any disruptions, travel companies can respond to their customer queries faster with the right message and the right channel.
Ticket bookings from all touchpoints are integrated into the cloud. Airline Company’s reservation and customer experience teams now have access to a unified view of customer interactions. During Covid-19, customers’ calls and queries were handled effectively by airline companies using Customer 360. Also, companies were successful in transitioning their teams from the workplace to work from home successfully.
Other Added Benefits:
- If travel plans have been changed or cancelled, eligible customers can now receive their compensations in less than 24 hours which traditionally used to take four to six weeks.
- Today, people simply don’t wish to buy a ticket but also want to be informed on various hotel options, events to attend while on stay, commute, and others.
- Airline ticket systems can now compare pricing with more accurate data from the cloud using Customer 360 predictive analytics and data discovery capabilities.
Personalization –Key Driver for Success
Industries’ complete range of ancillary services is often neglected, leading to poor customer experience. The cause can be primarily because of the lack or incomplete customer behaviour profile. Even through OTA or any other channel, the seller cannot anticipate the right ancillary service for the customer and therefore misses out on a great revenue generation opportunity.
By analyzing past behavior, social media activities, and customers’ online behavior, travel service firms can target the right cross-sell and up-sell opportunities and use the right channel. Customer 360 view provides ease of operations by providing a dynamic view of tested data. Customer 360’s data discovery capabilities help get accurate data from the cloud, which can be later applied across all verticals enabling them to grab the attention of more customers and retain the present ones.
Customer 360 Personalization in Hospitality
Hospitality industries are now proactive in analyzing revenue generation by collecting information from various venues and understanding customer activities. They can now make enhanced data-based operational decisions that will benefit both- the hotels and customers. For example:
- Hospitality segments can now update or inform customers or prospective customers in real-time using the marketing cloud over email, SMS, and Push notifications.
- Hotels can now segment customers by demographics, age, preference; and change their offerings dynamically. It can now add a personalization touch and create a WOW factor for its customers.
Customer 360 can amplify business operations with deeper analytics and customer data widening the scope for business scalability.
Sources: Statista