José Lorenzo

Distribution, CRM and Strategic Planning Director, Posadas (Grupo Posadas, S.A.B. de C.V.)

Supernova Award Category: 

Next-Generation Customer Experience

The Organization: 

Posadas, a public company listed on the Mexican Stock Exchange, is a leading hotel operator in Mexico. Posadas has a history of solid growth since the opening of its first hotel in 1970. With an aggressive development plan in recent years—nearly one new hotel per month and 100 additional hotels within the next five years—Posadas operates more than 170 hotels and more than 24,000 rooms under its different brands, which leads to effective centralized management and a high-level economy of scale. Some of their brands are Fiesta Americana, Grand Fiesta Americana, Fiesta Inn, Explorean, Gamma, One, and Live Aqua. Posadas has a call center unit, a vacation club, a loyalty program, and has been recognized as one of the Great Places to Work. 

http://www.posadas.com/en/home

The Problem: 

The objective of the Customer Experience initiative is to create an internal culture that seeks to perpetuate relevant and intimate relationships through contextual interactions based on information, analysis, and technology. The Data Equity project is at the heart of this objective. However, since 2006 Posadas had a system for customer recognition created by different teams with different visions and priorities. The result was 15 million customer records of which 9 million were duplicated or incomplete. Besides this, there were integration problems and obsolete systems resulting in a very limited use of the information. Thus, the 38 percent of useful data still had limitations of veracity and availability over time. The relationship between the main data sources—property management systems, loyalty programs, and vacation club—used to be slow or nonexistent, and there was no data governance or single source of truth providing a unified customer definition among the different groups. The Customer Experience processes were below Posadas expectations, personnel facing the customer operated with limited data, and a lot of guessing and duplicity of processes performed by different teams were impacting the operational costs. These data needed to be integrated, clean, and enriched to provide unique records. Improved data would enable operational areas to recognize guests and their histories and to make the best possible decisions to create unforgettable moments. 

The Solution: 

Automated data collection from the three main source systems: 1) Property management systems: Distributed at every hotel, this source includes guest personal data and transactional data; 2) Vacation club system: Customer data, memberships, and consumption; 3) Loyalty program: Customer and program data such as type, levels, scores and redemptions. Direct connection with more than 170 hotels that have no reliable network links. Data quality to clean and standardize customer data. MDM for deduplication, matching and merging, considering survivorships rules, and creating a Golden Record. Analytic processes to score and segment customers based on reliable customer data along with their transactions. Reliable customer information organized by Golden Record, customer, and transactional data, available individually by web services for operational areas like hotels and reservation call center, or in bulk with data integration for marketing purposes. 

The Results: 

The results are described in the following categories:

Better Customer Identification

  • More accurate and complete by the reliable, deduped, and enriched information
  • Identification of exact membership levels and delivery of the appropriate benefits during the customer’s stay
  • Improvement in customer recognition response time

Increase Service and Income Levels

  • Better segmentation for customer marketing campaigns and web customization
  • Identification of the guest even before his arrival, enabling personnel to create memorable experiences known as AMA moments (Attitude, Magic, and Action)
  • Improves the guest experience and favors repeated purchases
  • More cross-selling opportunity and incremental sales

Operating Results

  • Quality of information
    • Increases data quality levels
    • Allows broader and more complex data integration
    • Gathers all information sources in a single repository
  • Optimizes database operation in hotels
    • Integration of customer data at the corporate level with the distributed local databases in hotels
    • Eliminates redundant data management activity
    • Eliminates redundant integration activities
    • Improves hotel operation efficiency
  • Improves operation costs
    • Architecture already integrated with Salesforce (CRM system)
    • Lower percentage of error in the customer billing process
    • Improvement in efficiency of total maintenance costs per year
Metrics: 

The MDM solution was fully rolled out in March 2019, considering the integration of historical information (from 2016 to date) of reservations, vacation club, and loyalty programs.

Currently, we have the following metrics:

  • Daily compilation of more than 3,000 database views from more than 185 databases distributed in hotels and corporate data centers
  • More than 6,500 maps of integration, cleaning, deduplication, and matching executed daily
  • 4.1 million Golden Records—identifiable persons
  • 72 percent of Golden Records contactable by email, telephone, or address
  • 624 million records in the database, including transactions and customer traceable data
  • More than 11,000 daily web service information inquiries
  • Significant savings on Capex and Opex
The Technology: 

 

  • Deduplication, enrichment, and merge technology - Informatica Cloud Customer 360 for Salesforce (MDM)
  • Informatica Cloud (IICS), Informatica Cloud Real Time (ICRT)
  • Data Quality Information Technology (IDQ), Informatica Data as a Service (DaaS)
  • Salesforce Enterprise Edition
  • Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Oracle ODS on AWS
  • Data Sources - 170 SQL server databases, 1 Siebel database, 1 flat file
  • Security: VPN, JDBC, Secure agent
  • System Integrator - Solvis Consulting, LLC
Disruptive Factor: 

The objective for creating an internal culture to provide relevant experiences to customers is based on the AMA philosophy using customer data:

  • Attitude: The passion that feeds us and moves us to provide attention and service to our guests, collaborators, and families.
  • Magic: Transforming the impossible into the possible, the ordinary into the extraordinary—into an AMA moment.
  • Action: Ensuring operational guidelines for a memorable experience at each point of contact with internal and external customers.

Empowering the employees is key for this process, as they are in the best position to create the memorable experiences since they know the guests directly.

Implementation of a creative culture for the employees and the freedom and consent to customize guests’ stays required leaving obsolete procedures manual aside. Employees are now being trained to support their decisions with information.

The disruptive factor has been the joy observed in the employees at having data about the customers, knowing who they are and their history with the brand, along with the personal information they receive when they relate directly to them. This has led to an explosion of imagination and possibilities for creating these memorable moments.

Shining Moment: 

We have discovered artists who were hidden in operative roles, such as employees who added decorations to a dinner tablecloth to surprise a couple on their anniversary or who prepared a room with treats for a guest‘s beloved pet. Guests traveling individually who happened to be corporate executives have decided to start a business alliance with the brand due to their good experience - perfectly aligned with the strategic goal of having and retaining the best talent for the company.

About Your Organization

We are a modern company dedicated to our commitment to our guests, consistently creating unforgettable moments and successful stays through our world-class service. We consistently create and offer jobs in the communities that are home to our hotels and offer assistance and support during times of crisis.