With courage to become the digital innovation leader of the hotel industry
Transformation from OTA (Online Travel Agency)-dependent hotel company to hotel group with the best omni-channel customer experience.
H-Hotels AG is a family-run hotel company with 2,800 employees and 9,700 hotel rooms. With around 60 properties in 50 different destinations in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, H-Hotels is one of the largest hotel companies in the DACH region.
The brands Hyperion, H4 Hotels, H2 Hotels, H + Hotels, H.ostels and H.omes belong to the hotel group. H-Hotels is one of three AAA-rated hotel companies in Germany.
Challenge
Hotel bookings are generally made predominantly via online travel agencies (OTAs) such as HRS or Booking.com. These transfer practically no guest data to the hotels apart from names and ages. This data sovereignty of the OTAs has so far made it difficult for H-Hotels.com to generate and enrich marketing-oriented guest data and to use it profitably in communication with the guest. H-Hotels.com thus lacked in part the basis for being able to carry out modern data-driven marketing. Data-protected marketing activities to draw attention to additional offers were not carried out.
- Introduction Salesforce SalesCloud and Platform
- Master data management and creation of golden guest records
- Integration of the Salesforce platform with hotel and booking systems
- Introduction of Salesforce Marketing Cloud with Email, Advertising and Social Studio
- Introduction of Salesforce DMP
- Development of customer data platform
- Implementation of journeys and campaigns around booking and hotel stay; activation campaigns
- B2B sales processes and contract management
- Analytics and development of a central reporting
Before
- No access to customer data
- highly fragmented, outdated IT infrastructure
- various parallel systems with many duplicates
- varying data quality
- many data silos
- lack of DSGVO compliance
After
- highly innovative system architecture on Salesforce platform
- direct customer acquisition
- highly customer-centric approach possible
- efficiently managed digital campaigns, DSGVO compliant
Solution
As part of the group's digitization initiative, the entire marketing function was reorganized. Sales and marketing processes were restructured and digitally implemented with the Salesforce Sales Cloud. Master data management on the Salesforce platform delivers clean customer profiles, which are used in the Marketing Cloud and the Customer Data Platform in journeys and campaigns. With a variety of innovative system solutions, guest data is generated and enriched at all brand touchpoints and along the entire customer journey. This data enables personalized content to be played out automatically to guests across all channels.
The project was globally recognized with the Salesforce Innovation Award in 2019.
- Salesforce Sales Cloud as a data platform that enables the development of guest-centric processes based on a standard solution.
- Jitterbit as middleware for connecting and integrating various IT systems and transferring guest and booking data to Salesforce Sales Cloud.
- A master data management system with clearMDM to merge guest and booking data and thus make the data usable for marketing automation and targeting.
- Salesforce Email Studio and Salesforce Journey Builder to automate pre- and post-stay emails, booking confirmations for newsletter distribution, and transactional mailings for the loyalty program.
- Salesforce Audience Studio to use third-party data to optimize online marketing spend and increase market share. In addition, connectivity to Salesforce Advertising and Social Studio to create personalized campaigns across social media and other marketing channels.
- A social customer service and case management based on Salesforce Service Cloud in conjunction with Social Studio to provide a 360° view of how customers interact with the brand on social media channels and improve service across social media channels.
- Personalization of the website experience from the individual arrangement of content to the playout of exclusive content through meaningfully interlocked complementary tools.
- Testing of new website content and designs before playout to all users.
Results
Travelers' expectations of a personalized and modern hotel experience are high. In order to offer its guests a unique customer experience in the hotel market along the entire customer journey, H-Hotels.com has opted for digital transformation with a highly innovative system architecture, the likes of which have never been seen before in the hospitality sector - bold, forward-looking and deliberately against established industry-specific IT systems.
Guests of H-Hotels.com are to experience the best individual experience in the entire hotel industry by means of scalable and automated processes. In a perfectly coordinated symbiosis of technology, content and experience, not only were innovative solutions defined for addressing customers, but the entire customer acquisition process was also relaunched.
A lot has happened in the first 5 months since implementation:
- Measured customer satisfaction as well as rebooking rates increased.
- Over 300,000 guest accounts were consolidated.
- With more than 200,000 online reservations made, an increase was achieved compared to the same period last year.
- Approximately 150,000 stays were recorded and added to profiles.
- Over 90,000 post-stay emails were sent with an open rate of 42%.
- For the first time, around 97,000 pre-stay emails with an open rate of over 60% have been sent so far.