Club Carlson, Carlson Rezidor’s global hotel rewards program, recently recognized and rewarded its one millionth member in Asia Pacific with one million Club Carlson Gold Points®. Club Carlson, one of the fastest-growing in the world, has more than 12 million members globally. It is ranked fourth among all the top hospitality rewards programs.
Rachael Marret, senior vice president, Customer Engagement, Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group, participated in a riveting Q&A with Loyalty360 to discuss loyal customers, technology, and big challenges.
How do you define loyalty, what does it mean to your organization, and how has it changed in recent years? How has the strategy and focus changed in recent years?
In the past, loyal guests were largely defined as members of our loyalty program. That has evolved to a much broader, and arguably more accurate, definition of any guest who gives us a larger share of their wallet and advocates for our brands.
As such, the value of a loyalty guest is being redefined to include not just transactional behaviors like frequency of stay and spend, but also the power of their advocacy.
We know that the value equation is also being redefined for our guests. Points and free room nights are no longer the only form of reward. Relevancy and the overall experience are increasingly more valuable.
What does it mean for Club Carlson to surpass 1 million members in Asia Pacific?
As Club CarlsonSM expands into new markets, it becomes important to capture a significant member base in order to provide a qualified audience for a wide range of promotional and partnership opportunities to continually expand the value of the program to our members.
We viewed 1 million members as the critical mass necessary to achieve our program goals for this region.
To what would you attribute this milestone to and how have customers embraced your loyalty program?
The achievement of this milestone was a result of focused efforts across all hotels to promote the value of Club Carlson and encourage enrollment in the program. Enrollment incentives for hotel employees and extensive training regarding the benefits of the program were key to the effort.
What does Customer Experience / Customer Engagement mean to your organization, how has it changed over recent years or since you have been on the job?
We recently conducted a global study examining Customer Experience where guests identified more than 100 touch points within hotels from pre- to post-stay. As consumer connection points continue to proliferate, we have many more opportunities, and therefore an even larger responsibility, to engage guests and offer them great experiences along the way.
What are the biggest challenges you see in the next two years?
Keeping ahead of guest expectations; the stakes are getting higher for delivering experiences that are more personalized, immediate, and frictionless.
Marketers are tasked to be more data-centric than ever before, yet the challenge of creating actionable insight from data is more challenging than before. What is your advice for marketers?
The obvious barrier to creating actionable insights is not having the right data. So with one of our new brands, we are attempting to begin with designing the ideal guest experience and then figuring out what data, technology, and human touch are necessary to deliver something meaningful. And if we do that right, the data and the insights it delivers should be imminently more actionable.
Can you offer our audience a high level overview of your customer philosophy and share how this perspective helps drive more effective engagement and better marketing outcomes?
As a hospitality company, making our guests feel special and serving them in any way possible is deeply embedded in our DNA. So whether we are face to face, connecting through digital channels, or even designing the physical product, we are focused on providing some type of value and satisfaction with every interaction. And when guests feel their experience is genuinely cared about, they naturally become more engaged and responsive to our brands.
What role does technology play in your customer engagement, experience, and loyalty efforts?
Like most consumer-facing industries, technology is increasingly playing a role of enablement to delivering better service and convenience to our guests. Given that we are in the travel business, providing great mobility experiences is, of course, a crucial part of how we serve our guests today. But that’s only the beginning. During a time of accelerating innovation, it is exciting to be in the hotel category where many emerging technologies have great application to our business and how we offer better experiences.