InterContinental Hotels Group and Communispace:
A 24/7 Listening Channel that Drives Results
Finalist
The Short Story: InterContinental Hotels Group markets Holiday Inn, Hotel Indigo, and Crowne Plaza hotel properties all over the world. Since April 2007, IHG has partnered with Communispace to build and facilitate their three private online communities of roughly 300 members each—all of them members of their loyalty program. These communities pipe customer ideas, insights, and opinions into their organization every day.
IHG turns to the communities for help in developing promotions, new features and services for the loyalty program, hotels, their brands, and everything in between. They accomplish this by using traditional methods such as surveys and threaded discussions, and more innovative techniques, such as photos, video, and even voicemail. They connect daily with the communities through questions and requests; asking members everything from what is most important to them during their typical hotel stay, to what they think of an upcoming promotion.
Customer insights are then funneled back to stakeholders and executives, giving them an ongoing connection to their most important customers. IHG integrates the community members’ insights into strategic, corporate business decisions, helping them create training documents for their hotels and call centers, creative briefs for promotions and advertising campaigns, and their actual marketing materials.
The perfect starting point for IHG’s social marketing journey.
At the core of developing their approach to social marketing, was the idea that IHG would put the customer at the center of everything. Using their private online communities as the starting point, they ensure a customer-first approach, while testing ideas and honing their listening skills in a "safe" environment.
IHG recently extended their social marketing footprint by launching a public community open to all Priority Club Rewards members. The name, design, images, and functionality for this public community was largely determined by work done in the private communities. In other words, the public community is largely a product of the input of their customers and designed for their customers. IHG has also extended its reach by utilizing third-party social networks (such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter), again using the input and ideas stemming from their private Communispace communities.
Measuring what matters.
Though obvious, it is worth pointing out that the hotel business and allied loyalty programs are very high-touch businesses to operate. IHG serves as a "home away from home" for millions of customers worldwide. It's no surprise then, that they have seen tremendous rates of response and committed participation by members of their communities—leading to frequent opportunities to convert their community work into real business results.
Results have come in all flavors—increased revenue, decreased costs, and converting brand detractors into brand advocates.
More relevant marketing and promotions.
Members in their private communities love to upload photos from their travels into the community. IHG noted two important insights about this practice: one, some photos were remarkably good, and two, in their peers’ photos, members found compelling reasons for traveling to the destinations pictured. This led them to use member photos from the communities in their direct-mail campaigns and promotional literature.
Doing so has yielded multiple benefits not only to IHG, but to the members as well: the members whose photos are used feel a new sense of ownership with the program, have greater social currency among their peers in the loyalty program, and have a greater sense of notoriety as they’re credited in the collateral. As a result of using members’ photos in global marketing collateral, IHG:
- Saved the costs of stock footage or original photography and agency fees
- Created more credible and compelling marketing
- Experienced a 24% incremental lift in revenue since the inception of using member photos in the collateral.
Other member-generated content has been used in their marketing, such as using their Top Ten Packing Tips or testimonials. This content was integrated in multiple communications, such as brand websites, emails, direct mail pieces, in hotel collateral, and on social networking sites.
Through the community, IHG learned about the kinds of promotions their loyalty program members wanted. Using this input, IHG tested a newly-designed promotion with the community that had a viral component to amplify its reach. The campaign, which was given to 150 U.S.-based private online community members, quickly spread to friends and family in more than 30 countries—including Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Lithuania, and Malaysia.
- The Triple Points Promotion drove a $250,000 in incremental revenue in just six weeks.
- IHG reached customers who they might not have been able to—and it did so without any of the costs typically incurred with traditional promotion strategies.
Customer advocates share the love.
Through the creation of brand advocates in its private online communities, IHG has been able to tap into its members' passions and expertise about the company, loyalty program, and brands for its public online community.
- Members from IHG's private online communities blog at least once a week for the IHG public community about their travels and the loyalty program.
- Members have been tapped to serve as community ombudsman to help answer members' questions on the IHG public community site.
In exchange for the prolific content creation and engagement with loyalty program members and customer service, the private online community members receive Priority Club Points—a fraction of what IHG would spend on an agency to create content or manage customer questions.
IHG has logged hundreds of cases over more than two and a half years of converting potential brand detractors into advocates. They do this through a process within the private communities which affords IHG the opportunity to address issues that members have with the program or hotel stays. In the aftermath of resolving these issues, they find that the member almost always returns to the community to tell their story, and to champion IHG's service and the brand involved.
- Retaining key customers by listening and responding creates vocal advocates who spread positive word of mouth in whatever other social networks they belong to.
- Net Promoter Score (measured twice a year) for community members is rising at the rate of 1 to 1.5 points per year on average.
"IHG took a chance in starting this community and supporting the ideas that came from this elite group. The fact that all levels of management and ownership seem to take interest in what this group says is unlike any other hotel brand out there...Through this community I feel that I, along with my fellow community members, made a difference in the PCR program and IHG brands. Being an influence to something this big is a real positive and carries over to the perception of the program and brands." (F. J., Premium, Platinum Ambassador)
Insights from members improve the customer experience.
Members in one of the private online communities were frustrated by carrying around multiple loyalty cards. A lively discussion ensued and resulted in a revised design of the Priority Club Cards that’s customizable to add other loyalty program numbers to the back of their cards.
- To date, members in more than 80 countries have taken advantage of this customer-inspired feature of the loyalty program.
The net: Listening to customers has proven invaluable to IHG
in ways that dollars alone cannot convey.
Cassandra Jeyaram, PhD, Social Marketing Manager for IHG: "Our early successes in engaging with customers, testing ideas, and developing processes and learnings from their input have enabled some major wins for our company. I can’t imagine how we could have accomplished so much and made so many customer-driven changes without this ongoing connection to our most valued guests."
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