By Harminder Singh Ari
In a world marred with boring content, customer engagement becomes the edge that the world’s leading travel and hospitality brands need. When done correctly, customer engagement enables businesses to gain a competitive advantage by fostering brand loyalty and awareness through personalized customer interactions and aids in prioritizing and extending relationships with customers between flights, stays, and experiences.
New technologies have increased competition among tourism providers, emphasizing the importance of personalization. Hence, customer engagement strategies for tourism companies play a critical role in significantly growing a brand’s net sales and profit margin growth by providing both direct and indirect benefits.
Why is customer engagement important?
• It boosts sales funnel velocity and revenue
• It fetches customer feedback and insights
• And it helps sustain customer interest.
Here are some strategies that Online Travel Aggregators (OTAs) can implement to build consistent customer journeys across touchpoints:
1. Leveraging Data Intelligence With Customer Data Platform (CDP): With every customer’s unique interaction with the platform comes the need for a 360-degree view of their attributes, behavior, and patterns to customize a user roadmap. A CDP helps travel companies unify & protect customer data and establish relevant insights to provide customers with a hyper-personalized omnichannel experience.
2. Personalization As A Key Tool For Customer Engagement: Personalization is no longer optional, and that’s the truth. The more brands personalize their content and communication and give them a holistic experience on their platform, the more likely are users to remain loyal and not churn. Moreover, personalization brings in a sizable increase in sales, ROI, and user engagement. Personalization & recommendation across channels and user segments ensure increasing user engagement.
3. Omnichannel Marketing: Companies must shift their focus from a channel-centric to a customer-centric approach to remain competitive in the travel industry. Omnichannel marketing is a great tool to enhance customer engagement and retention by creating a cohesive campaign that reaches customers across multiple touchpoints.
4. Breaking Data Silos: An organization’s silos must be broken down to think beyond channels. Data isolation makes it difficult for businesses to determine the extent of a particular team’s impact on CX activities.
5. Increasing Retention: When you pay attention to increasing user retention in your business, you invariably drive sales, increase conversions, and boost business. You decrease your CAC, nurture leads and users better, and incentivize users to remain loyal to your platform. It’s a well-known fact that the cost of acquiring new customers is often much higher than retaining existing ones. This is why investing in retention efforts can significantly impact a company’s bottom line. A user spending twice on your platform will always be more important than spending once and leaving.
Needless to say, customer engagement is at the forefront of campaigns, companies, and currency (sales).
Customer engagement is more important than ever in today’s fast-paced and constantly evolving business landscape. Companies that neglect to engage with their customers risk losing them to competitors who prioritize this vital aspect of business.
To ensure they are meeting the needs and expectations of their customers, companies must first determine the actual cost of ignoring engagement. A great place to start is by evaluating where they stand in comparison to industry benchmarks in a post-pandemic world. By doing so, companies can gain valuable insight into where to improve to stay competitive.
(The writer is Vice President – India Sales at WebEngage. Views expressed are personal)
