Danielle Harvey shares how travel customers are using different channels, why testing doesn’t always have to end in success, and how travel companies can integrate AI to provide a more engaging customer experience.
Currently Vice President, Industries, Partnerships & Emerging Products at Quantum Metric, Danielle Harvey, has a long experience in the travel industry. She also spent 11 years at one of the world’s largest hotel brands, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, driving a data-driven approach to optimizing customer experience. With roles including digital acquisition, voice of the customer, CRM, experimentation, and digital analytics, she has a unique understanding of the travel customer journey.
Danielle Harvey spoke with AB Tasty’s Head of Marketing and host of The 1000 Experiments podcast, John Hughes, about the importance of connecting channels in the travel industry, using testing to understand the customer journey, and how brands can best harness the power of AI.
Here are some of the key takeaways from their conversation.
Let customers do what they want where they want
COVID forced the travel industry to undergo an accelerated digital transformation. And travel customers now want a seamless cross-channel experience when booking. This is especially true when people frequently use different platforms at different stages of their buying journey and make multiple visits to your website before making a booking.
“We did some benchmark data and 75-80% of traffic in travel is on mobile at this point, but only about 25% of bookings are. It’s a heavy research channel, a day-of-travel channel, but not necessarily where people are comfortable purchasing yet,” says Danielle.
Enabling customers to transact in their channel of preference and connecting different channels therefore becomes vital. This provides immediate benefits for the customer but also operational efficiencies for providers.
Omnichannel may have been little more than a buzzword a few years ago. But with the true adoption of digital technology and improved methods of data collection, connecting those experiences is becoming more of a reality.
“A lot of travel can still be pretty siloed, but your customers don’t care,” explains Danielle. “They expect that your teams are speaking to each other, that there’s an overarching strategy.”
Even flat and failed tests can be learning experiences
Testing and experimentation don’t always have to be successful to provide you with valuable information to help you improve the customer experience. An example that Danielle gave was testing customer ratings and reviews on a website.
“Some of the most interesting testing I did was around reviews. Because the assumption was that if you get those out there on the site, they should really have an impact,” says Danielle.
But when almost a quarter of the people researching travel will typically visit your website as least five times before booking, it’s likely that they’re getting much of their information from other sources.
“It was always interesting that whenever we tried testing reviews, they didn’t really move the needle. So, your website is often not the only place people are going to go for information,” notes Danielle.
But this flat result helped drive the realization that while adding reviews might not have a direct financial impact, they were important for transparency. And at the same time, they made things easier for the customer.
And just because a test has failed, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t help to inform your strategy going forward. The key is to try and understand what happened and learn from that.
“Over time, I would typically see a 50/50 win to fail rate. But my focus on failed tests was always what do we learn from this, digging into the reason why it failed and then building a pipeline of testing and experimentation off of that,” says Danielle.
Use AI to improve the customer experience
AI-powered tools can create time efficiencies for travel providers and provide valuable context about customer intent. And many travel brands are using AI to help their employees service the customer faster.
“We’re doing some cool stuff at Quantum where an AI chat component will send a summary to a support agent who can immediately see what the customer was trying to do, rather than putting the burden on the customer to repeat themselves,” explains Danielle.
Integrating AI can also be extremely valuable for people involved in testing and experimentation.
“A lot of the excitement around AI, especially in things like personalization, is that you don’t need to come up with ideas yourself and test them, but ideally some of that is automated for you,” says Danielle.
If you launch a test and don’t specifically track certain behaviors, for example, it’s often hard to know how a user might interact with it. By using AI to auto capture data, you can watch what users did and use heat maps to see where they were engaging.
There’s also an increasing focus from both customers and travel providers on self-service. But many brands are still hesitant to have a lot of AI facing the customer. The key is finding the right balance.
“The unique thing with travel and hospitality is there is always a human element. You don’t want to digitize it completely,” advises Danielle. “You’re ideally delivering a nice experience as well.”
What else can you learn from our conversation with Danielle Harvey?
- The long-haul effect: How the travel customer journey differs from that of e-commerce.
- Voice of the customer: The importance of turning qualitative feedback into quantitative data.
- On brand: Some of the challenges involved in testing across different brand websites
- Experience over things: Why travel will continue to be a priority for many people going forward even though it might look different.
About Danielle Harvey
Danielle Harvey is Vice President, Industries, Partnerships & Emerging Products at Quantum Metric. Passionate about the travel industry, she spent 11 years prior to this leading digital and analytic teams at Wyndham Hotels & Resorts and has also worked for the Avis Budget Group.
About 1,000 Experiments Club
The 1,000 Experiments Club is an AB Tasty-produced podcast hosted by John Hughes, Head of Marketing at AB Tasty. Join John as he sits down with the experts in the world of experimentation to uncover their insights into what it takes to build and run successful experimentation programs.
