Interview with Prasanjeet Dutta Baruah Vice President Marketing at The Oberoi Group
PW: As a modern marketer what are your current priorities?
PDB: Apart from revamping our website and improving revenues through it we are focusing on improving our web marketing to make it more customer friendly and ‘self-service’. Another priority is the efficient and appropriate use of Social Media & Digital Communications. Naturally, being in the luxury services segment we want enhanced understanding of our customers behavior and usage patterns and will use analytics to do that.
PW: At the Oberoi Group how has technology played a role in customer acquisition or retention?
PDB: At the Oberoi Group, enhancing the guest experience and satisfaction are core to our business philosophy. Anticipating the needs of the guest and creating innovative and relevant engagement activities through the use of technology plays an important role in delivering a memorable experience and optimum Return On Investment for our marketing efforts.
An increasingly important point of contact with our guest and potential guest is the digital space. Using technology we have ensured that our booking process is safe and importantly, user-friendly. In order to enhance the user experience on our website we have implemented Content Repositioning through clickstream which by checking user behaviour enables us to serve relevant content. An optimum use of SEM campaigns, consistent SEO and landing pages ensures that the user is served relevant information with minimal navigation. This has resulted in an increase in the number of bookings, while bringing down the cost per booking.
Given the growing importance of Social media, our strategy not just consists of relevant information dissemination and engagement, but also includes a strong focus on taking it a step further by converting the engagement into business through Social Commerce via a booking console on our Facebook page. Our presence on social media channels like Twitter, Linkedin, Google +, Youtube etc. ensure that our customer can reach us anywhere, anytime.
In the analytics space, we have embarked on a project that uses technology for data analytics and has aided us in understanding our guests preferences, trends and behavioral patterns better. This, in turn, would help us predict and arrest churn, make targeted offers for increasing guest lifetime value, and identify relevant acquisition segments. A robust campaign management engine allows us targeted, customized and effective deliveries and an efficient feedback loop makes future campaigns more intelligent and more efficient, delivering greater Return on Investment.
PW: How has technology played a role in new product development, market expansion or other areas?
PDB: With an improved understanding of guest preferences and behavioral patterns, we can now create tailored products (offers) for different guest segments. Our new offers or packages are largely driven by insight into guest stay and spend patterns & trends. Similarly, we’re also able to focus on segments for expansion or communication basis specific in-bound trends and patterns.
Direct mail is an important channel of communication for us. Using technology each campaign is analyzed with key metrics such as open rates, click throughs and responses. This enables higher ROI on each campaign.
