Data & Analytics Case Study
North Highland partnered with an international hotel conglomerate to apply a scalable analytics solution that extracts insights from customer comments on social review sites including Trip Advisor, Booking.com, and Google. By pairing this data with the company’s internal data, North Highland has helped the company gain up-to-date granular insights into customer satisfaction by property, brand, region, and in comparison to competitors. Ultimately, our tool is enabling the design of better targeted and more effective customer engagement strategies—a replicable solution for other organizations seeking to extract insights from customers and maximize the bottom-line impact of analytics.
Client Situation
A leading international hotel conglomerate with 12 sub-brands and over 5,000 hotels around the globe had access to a wealth of customer data, along with a social listening tool on which they spent $1 - $2M per year. This tool offered visibility into customer sentiment and discussion across social media platforms. The company’s customer satisfaction team also collected their own view of customer satisfaction via guest surveys.
However, the existing tools didn’t offer the company flexibility in compiling and reviewing the data the way they needed it, particularly with regards to anytime insights around individual properties, subbrands, and competitors. Without this flexibility, the company couldn’t leverage the information fully to influence strategy. They needed a more flexible and dynamic way to make comparisons between properties, sub-brands, locations, and distinct groupings of competitors.
Our Approach
In bringing this solution to the client, North Highland first sought to understand the client’s key customer satisfaction data sources, including travel review sites like Trip Advisor and Booking.com. The team worked with the client to learn how guests utilize each source. Needs and goals for the insights were then refined, including the client’s need to access multiple data sets in a granular, comparative way.
We then developed code to scrape the data from each source and pull it into an environment that included internal insights (satisfaction scores, pricing, location) from guest surveys. Next, North Highland engineered a single data source, applied structuring logic, and defined relationships between the information sets. A custom interactive dashboard was then built to serve the company’s specific needs.
A set of approximately 20 key stakeholders from a variety of business units provided feedback on the core visualizations needed in the tool. This input was combined with North Highland’s suggested design to create a series of dashboards that provide specialized views of the data sets. One dashboard showcases consistency in customer satisfaction scores; heavy fluctuations in scores are a red flag around levels of staffing and service. Another dashboard highlights locations where the conglomerate’s presence is sparse, pointing to opportunities for acquisition and expansion. A third dashboard breaks down satisfaction scores into categories including service, staff, and cleanliness to offer insight into areas to improve.
North Highland’s solution aggregated data from over 9 million reviews, with plans to scale to more than 100 million, offering unprecedented insight into customer satisfaction across the company’s global properties.
Value Delivered
North Highland equipped the client with a controllable and precise solution for insight into customer sentiment. By combining these insights with social listening and demographic data, the tool helps create a 360-degree view of the client’s customers, what those customers value, and ultimately, the steps the company needs to take to improve customer engagement. Through these insights, North Highland has positioned the organization to better define a targeted engagement strategy that moves the needle on satisfaction, acquisition, and loyalty. Beyond this specific engagement, North Highland also equipped the client with the robust raw data set for querying and custom analysis.
North Highland is continuing to partner with the client to scale this solution. The initial solution aggregated data from over 9 million reviews, with plans to scale to more than 100 million, offering unprecedented insight into customer satisfaction across the company’s global properties. The team has identified uses for the tool across 10 functions in the organization including brand strategy, global strategy, and guest loyalty, with use cases ranging from site testing to complex text analytics. Through this wide range of applications, North Highland’s solution has helped the organization unlock the potential of insights and garner alignment around the value of analytics.