How Companies Are Using Data to Improve the Corporate Travel Experience

As big data grows and companies can (responsibly) leverage it for their customers’ needs, habits, and preferences, corporate travel services are being greatly enhanced as a result. Whether it’s a simple airline booking to a 360-degree travel management app, data utilization is allowing companies to enhance the business travel customer experience like never before.

Shep Hyken, an author and Customer Service Consultant for brands such as American Airlines, says that “the travel industry has so much information about customers, yet they’re probably the biggest data under-utilizer.” It has been reported that the average airline only has 40-55% of their customers in a database, causing the stakeholders behind travel companies to see a path for increased data utilization.

Using Travel Data to Fully Understanding Customers

Travel management apps, hotel companies, airlines, and many other travel-related organizations are racing to analyze big data in order to offer personalized services to their customers. Using sources such as social media, customer service calls, and online booking forms, travel companies are trying to paint a more vivid picture of each individual customer, tailoring services and offers to their personal needs. The ultimate goal? To provide the most custom, enjoyable, seamless experience, every time.

How Travel Data Enhances Customer Loyalty

As travel loyalty programs become less important to many customers, companies are looking to leverage data in order to enhance and personalize the customer experience. The idea here is that a significantly better customer experience will naturally cause people to turn in to loyal customers, as opposed to relying upon subpar rewards and incentives.

Hotel services tend to rely on loyalty programs as they only have access to limited personal data. The opposite can be said of airlines, who have access to a lot more information due to security checks and measures. This is causing hotel systems to be much more proactive about their data, looking to collect additional input from touchpoints such as customer call centers and the like. Building personalized loyalty programs, or simply enhancing the customer experience to a point where loyalty becomes guaranteed, is the most sensible way to achieve customer loyalty in the modern age.

Using Data to Support Artificial Intelligence and Bots

The creators of travel management apps and other similar services are continually using big data to improve services for their customers, even going as far as to automate much of the business travel booking process for them. Many platforms will “remember” a user’s preferences and habits, and use this data to make suggestions for them when they use the system again in the future.

Data can allow companies to boost their customer service and loyalty even further than ever before. If you’d like to find out more about data and how it can be used in solutions such as travel management apps, get in touch with us today to speak to a representative.