Making The Case: Real World Solutions from People in the Trenches
ColdSpark Empowers Fairmont Hotels & Resorts to Maximize the E-Channel
A leader in the global hospitality industry, Fairmont Hotels & Resorts is an extraordinary collection of luxury hotels around the world. Featuring many iconic landmarks situated in some of the most exclusive and pristine areas in the world, Fairmont hotels offer one of-a-kind properties to sophisticated travelers.
The Challenge
As Fairmont Hotels & Resorts increasingly turns to email as its primary customer communications channel, contact management and analysis of guest behavior has become a top priority. To support this priority, Fairmont has, for some time, employed an inhouse data warehouse, a CRM application, and email delivery systems. But, large gaps existed between direct mail, reservation, loyalty, and marketing email communication with its guests. These disparities prevented Fairmont's lines of business from analyzing guest activity to steer current and future cross-channel efforts and ultimately hindered Fairmont's use of the e-channel to optimize its guests' experience.
What is more, Fairmont had multiple email systems in play—one for guest transactions, another for untargeted hotel marketing communications, and one for higher-visibility, targeted loyalty and marketing messaging. Only the latter provided Fairmont with any delivery and response metrics. The other email systems provided only a vehicle for outbound email delivery with little insight into the deliverability and effectiveness of a deployment.
A final challenge was Fairmont's requirement that any changes in technology could not introduce cumbersome processes, substantial learning curves or other inefficiencies.
The Solution
The recognition that email is the most efficient and cost-effective customer care mechanism forced an audit of Fairmont's multiple detached systems. The result illustrated the need for improved interoperability between existing systems, as well as consolidation to a single e-channel platform to manage all of Fairmont's high-touch email communications. Fairmont also realized the savings derived from such a system would allow for more targeted, relevant, and timely communications across all channels.
- The first step taken was an upgrade of the data warehouse to provide higher sophistication in business intelligence over its data. This opened the door to greater analytics capabilities and enabled Fairmont to increase its amount and depth of data collection.
- Next, since Fairmont was quite comfortable with its CRM tool's segmentation capabilities and process, only minor adaptations for the new data warehouse were required.
- The third critical step was the consolidation of its email platforms. Fairmont selected ColdSpark's MailFusion Email Automation System, powered by the SparkEngine Mail Transport Platform, to provide centralized email automation and delivery. This new enterprise e-channel platform now provides all Fairmont's user-level metrics tracking, as well as supports the latest email authentication methods (DK, DKIM).
So, how does employing three different customer care systems increase efficiency? The answer is interoperability. Through APIs, lightweight automations, and simple ETLs, all three solutions are seamlessly integrated into a single elegant customer care platform. Because the security and privacy of Fairmont's guest data is paramount, all integrations leverage dedicated secure transfer protocols. While providing far greater visibility into customer contact management; communication history and preferences; plus cross-channel segmentation and funneling, the impact on Fairmont's information technology and lines of business is minimal. Much of the same process for campaign execution is used, but Fairmont now has the ability to gain more valuable insight into its campaigns, and most importantly, is able to intelligently and rapidly act on it. All data collected at every touch point is fed back into the data warehouse, and the full picture of a guest's communication stream becomes increasingly clear.
The Results
The end result is seamless execution of timely and relevant email communications for its various customers. Whether the customer is a lifelong loyal Fairmont guest or a prospect who has expressed interest in taking a golf vacation next summer, Fairmont can assure that its communication efforts are optimized every step of the way.
Through integration and consolidation of its disparate assortment of email platforms onto ColdSpark's e-channel enterprise platform, Fairmont can immediately recognize program cost savings and ensure they are sending the right message, to the right person, at the right time. TMP