Improved Customer Retention for Online Travel Site
Challenge
GetAway.com, one of the first online travel sites, provides internet and wireless reservations for airlines, hotels and car rentals. In addition, this database-driven travel marketing and transaction company offers vacation packages, tour and cruise departures and a vast amount of other destination and interest information. As with virtually all web-based commerce, customer retention was a major concern. To ensure customer retention, GetAway needed to answer two very compelling questions: What types of customers do we have? How long should they lie dormant before we consider them at risk for defection?
Solution
Data Square utilized its d2CR Retention solution which combines advanced statistical methodologies with market intelligence to create a segmentation scheme for GetWay’s customers. The solution included the creation of an analytic database that included in-depth analysis of GetAway’s source systems and an aggregation of transactions to the customer level. Next, a combination of Factor Analysis, Cluster Analysis, Discriminant Analysis, knowledge of the marketplace and buying habits were used to segment customers into homogenous groups. Finally, each group was operationalized in terms of variables on the database and profiled based on behavioral and demographic attributes.
Results
As a result of the initiative with Data Square, GetAway’s customers are only allowed to remain dormant for six months prior to being targeted for reactivation. This is down from the previous criterion of one full year. The realization that earlier intervention was required has saved countless customers for GetAway. In addition, results from the Profiling enabled GetAway marketers to precisely focus their messaging based on diverse customer needs.
