Choice Hotels Provides Enhanced Services for 15 Million Customers
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Choice Hotels International® is one of the largest and most successful lodging franchisors in the world, with over 5,000 hotels, inns, all-suite hotels and resorts open and under development in 45 countries and territories. To sustain its leadership position in the fast-paced, customer-driven service industry, Choice Hotels wanted a consolidated customer-centric information solution that would create a highly personalized hospitality experience for its guests. Furthermore, they were tracking only loyalty program participants, approximately 15 percent of their 15 million customers, leaving them unable to integrate information for the majority of their customers.
Choice Hotels required master data management (MDM) technology that would allow quick and easy identification of guests at any of its points of service – the Internet, reservations lines, within facilities, guest services or frequency programs. The goal was to capture and integrate complete customer history, including needs and preferences, which would enable them to hand-tailor services to customers everywhere.
The challenges facing Choice Hotels stemmed in part from the fact that customers have multiple identities; variations or discrepancies in names, addresses, phone numbers, numerical identifiers or other unique attributes – often residing in disparate systems that prevent enterprise initiatives from achieving a consolidated view.
Aggregating data that belongs together in a situation where there is not a consistent customer identifier could only be accomplished through integrating stay records from all properties and matching on demographic information. It was also particularly critical to seamlessly integrate information from Choice Hotel’s existing loyalty program, designed to track customer participation to earn points for free accommodations, and ultimately extend an even higher level of service through accurate identification of each customer including complete interaction history. Furthermore, to achieve effective deployment of both current and future CRM initiatives, it was mission-critical that the solution have the ability to link data maintained in all existing legacy systems.
Initiate software provided the technology to address the major challenge of capturing interaction history for all guests by:
- Matching customers based on their demographic information, eliminating the old model of using only frequent stayer numbers, which inhibited data aggregation for most customers
- Using name, address and e-mail in addition to frequent stayer numbers provided by the customer at registration
- Integrating stay records received from properties and conducting queries with the demographic data. If a match is found, the stay information is added to the customer record in the data warehouse. If a match is not found, a new customer record is created
- Keeping information up-to-date in the data warehouse for building intelligent, proactive reports that contribute to adding value to customers
By accurately linking their guest transaction and profile data, Choice Hotels is now able to find and track its best guests across multiple brands and properties, and use that information to show that they know and value those guests on each visit. To date, over 1 million stay transactions are processed each month, complete with a guest history. Through establishing a real-time master data management infrastructure, the necessary prerequisites for successful deployment of future CRM initiatives are now in place.
Read more in the Choice Hotels success story.
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