HRS turns to dynamic online personalization to improve customer service
HRS.com, Europe's leading hotel booking specialist, has become the first customer for new online marketing company Magiq.
HRS provides an online booking system giving its customers access to the largest online portfolio of bookable hotels. Magiq’s technology will be used on the company’s corporate site, HRScorporate.com, to help it provide a self service website for its corporate market. It asks each visitor to categorize themselves into one of the four HRS customer bases, enabling the marketing team to target each visitor with offers relevant to them. The result is that HRS doesn’t lose its audience by trying to sell the wrong service to the wrong person.
“We had a large number of visitors to our old site, but found it difficult to identify what each of them wanted from us,” explains Jon West, director UK and Ireland, at HRS. “The core principle of Magiq’s tools is not only ease of use but automatic capture of key events and information. We can now capture this information and more importantly act on it in real-time.”
The services are built around a suite of easy-to-use, pay-as-you-go tools that allows HRS to offer visitors to the site dynamic online personalization for a fraction of the cost of traditional approaches.
The Magiq solution avoids the time and expense of having to employ armies of programmers, analysts and taggers to implement traditional personalization, CRM and targeted marketing programs. Using advanced, proven Web 2.0 technology and analytics it automatically captures both real-time and historic information - such as e-mail address, organization, location and visitor history - and dynamically personalizes the HRS site and communications using this data. Encryption technology and dedicated virtualized servers also ensure that user privacy and security are respected and protected.
Malcolm Duckett, CEO at Magiq added: “Unlike multivariate testing (MVT) tools, the HRS.com site allows its marketing department to build tailored campaigns rather than relying on automatic ‘dumb’ products to make “best-guess” decisions. By utilizing behavioral targeting in this way HRS can understand the most relevant content to present to visitors based on their behavior and preferences over time”.
About HRS
HRS is a leading hotel bookings specialist for private and business travelers, offering accommodation at more than 250,000 hotels in all categories in 180 different countries. The company offers the largest selection of hotels worldwide, featuring tens of thousands of individual hotels and hundreds of hotel chains.
The free reservation service enables users to book hotel rooms over the Internet at the cheapest rates available – backed up by a best-price guarantee. HRS Exclusive Prices also guarantee to be at least 10 percent cheaper than on all competing sites. Detailed descriptions of hotels, expressive videos and about 2 million hotel evaluations by hotel guests facilitate the task of choosing a hotel. In addition to millions of private customers, we equip organizations with a simple, centralized, self-service solution which offers travelers choice, independence and value. The service is also free and provides real-time access to the largest portfolio of online bookable hotels with a best price guarantee.
The portal is entirely customizable and provides an intuitive interface for booking by any individual whether in the office or on the move. Experiencing it transforms the way organizations think about the self-service booking model and results in reduced hotel expenditure and improved booking efficiency for the business.
More than 20,000 companies regularly book their accommodation for business trips, conferences and group travel through HRS and benefit from special HRS corporate rates, which offer discounts of up to 30 percent on the already very cheap daily rates.
As an innovative pioneer, HRS also sets the standard for the sector in the realm of mobile devices. By developing new mobile applications for the BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad, Nokia and Android phones, and the Palm Pre, HRS is capitalizing on all the modern-day channels that help consumers find suitable accommodation more easily, even while traveling. The Hotels Now! app even enables available hotels in the immediate vicinity to be booked directly through the viewfinder of smartphone cameras.
Founded in 1972, the company has offices in Shanghai, London, Paris, Warsaw, Rome and Istanbul.
It is also the sole owner of the Innsbruck-based alpine portal www.tiscover.com.
www.hrs.com or www.hrscorporate.com
About Magiq
Magiq, the on-demand digital marketing company, is dedicated to helping marketers communicate more efficiently, freely and effectively with their online customers using data captured from each visitor.
Magiq provides marketers with easy-to-use, cloud-based, pay-as-you-go, online services that compile and use customers’ online behavior and history to optimize and personalize digital marketing communications to the individual.
Magiq uses teams of ‘Gnomes’ to power the services – a descriptive metaphor for those Magiq users with a non-technical mindset reflecting the “service-not-technology” nature of Cloud-based solutions. So Gnomes can be “hired” and given simple and intuitive rules and budgets by the Magiq user to adjust the banners, graphics and text on a page, or identify and categorize ‘hot’ leads or potentially defecting customers.
Magiq's solutions actually use advanced, proven Web 2.0 Technology and analytics to compile data about customers and visitors. By linking Magiq's automated digital marketing programs to data about individual customers, and their behavior and history of dealing with the site, Magiq can help marketing teams increase conversion rates, improve customer experience and increase customer engagement with the site, brand and products.
Media contacts
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Paul Stallard/Kate Jones/Kate Bartholomew
Berkeley PR
+44 118 988 2992
magiq@berkeleypr.co.uk
