[Music] [Julie Hoffmann] Welcome to Powering Customer Acquisition with AI-Driven Digital Experiences. It's a pleasure to have you join us this afternoon. Hopefully, you've had a great start of your Summit. If you've had a great start, raise your hand.
Do you guys like Main Stage? Good stuff.
So I'm Julie Hoffmann. I lead Global Industry Strategy for Travel, Hospitality, Dining and Loyalty. I worked in the industry for a little over 25 years. Prior to being at Adobe, I led digital and e-commerce for MGM Resorts International and Caesars Entertainment. So Las Vegas was my hometown for many years, and if you want stories after the session, I'm happy to share those with you.
Not in detail.
And joining me is Scott Strickland, the Chief Commercial Officer from Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. It's a pleasure to have him share his story. He's got some great information in terms of what their journeys look like, how they've been progressing, and the successes, which I'm very pleased that he's going to be sharing with you today.
So we got three topics that we're going to cover, the state of customer acquisition, accelerating acquisition with AI, so looking at what is the foundational tech that's actually changed. I think it's important to know that there's been a transformation, and then Wyndham's Hotel and Resort story, and he's going to bring it home in terms of not just customer acquisition, but looking at customer relationship management, retention, and lifetime value overall.
So when we talk about customer acquisition, the first thing that comes to mind for me is actually the retention piece of it because you acquire a customer, but keeping that customer can be really hard. They're not that loyal, and they can easily be swayed to another side for a variety of reasons, especially now in the age of AI. As experience actually improve, we are seeing that brand switching is happening at an exponential rate. A couple years ago, we did our loyalty research study. And in that study, what we learned is that the brands who embraced AI, they had $110 million incremental lift in their revenue over their peer set, which is substantially huge. So they were basically pulling share from their peers, and I would actually see this when I would meet with folks. They would say that they were either a net recipient or a net loser of customers, and they were struggling in either direction. So we've seen a bit of a swirl because consumers have chosen oftentimes the experience of switching brands in the process.
So it's 5 to 25 times more expensive to get a new customer than it is to retain one, so retention is a big piece of this just as the acquisition side.
And we recently finished, 24 to 48 hours ago, a customer acquisition research study that we will be publishing in the next couple of months. There has been 36% increase in customer acquisition costs over the last 3 years. So we anticipated this would be the case because of the loyalty churn that's happening, and we have results now today that reflect this. Only 27% of new customers actually made a second purchase. So how do you find and acquire those customers who basically booked with you once but then have not booked with you again? And the growth of lifetime value is not going up at the same ratio. So 4.5%, you might as well call it flat, right? 4.5%, is cost of living is the way I look at it barely.
And so there's been a change in terms of strategy, which I think is one of the biggest things with these increasing costs. It's like how do we manage this as a brand? What do we do? So it was over half of large enterprises, so 53%, and 40% of smaller enterprises that basically said that they are starting to invest in customer acquisition in a new way to focus on revenue realization. How do I realize more revenue? Now the tracking and the measurement of customer acquisition has been challenging. You're like, "I'm doing this work in the funnel." And the CFO is like, "Show me the money. Show me the money." No pun intended around the CFO side, but this is a missing piece of the puzzle is like, not only do you have your results in terms of what you're doing in terms of bookings, but how do you show the incrementality of what you're doing to show that I changed this media mix and I actually got more performance and more customers as a part of that acquisition.
So that incremental lift is really what we're looking at.
So there's a new way that we solve for this. And if you look at this, there's planning, there's reach, and there's measurement. So all three of these areas are changing. So the first thing is that most of the marketers are saying, "Hey, we believe in Media Mix Modeling." Over 61% say that they feel that this is the unlock in 2025, and it is. I'll be honest. I started out my career at Coca-Cola buying media, and it was an interesting experience in terms of how we tracked and how we measured it and said, "Hey, we brought in X number of impressions and what did that look like?" And I've done all sorts of different models around Media Mix Measurement and MMM and MMT. There's so many different iterations of this, but they're all inaccurate in terms of really showing incrementality. They all fall short. And so when we look at that the reach is the next piece of it. You want to not just find the fact that you're actually finding these customers today, but also how do you expand your reach through collaborations. So the second piece is you own your system today, your dot-com, your platform, your brand. How are you building a community with other brands so you can extend your brand message? That's the next iteration. In this age of AI, it's about distribution, and distribution can be chopped off in 2.2 seconds. If you are a brand who has your inventory on an OTA, for example, if the OTA shows your distribution, you get prioritized and sorted, you get more volume. It's very simple. So now how do you actually get that reach through partnerships and relationships, through collaboration? So the first piece of this was really about CDPs, getting the data collected and organized, and cleaned up. The second piece of it is now how do I exchange data with partners in such a way so that I can send my audience reach? How can I find these customers? And also, how can I suppress customers that are in my loyalty database that I don't want to talk to twice? That would not be good. 77% of marketers are marketing to their existing loyalty database through paid media. 77%. I want you to think about the dollar signs against that. It is astronomically high. It is huge.
And this last piece here, measurement. So C-suite's investing in data and analytics. They understand that there's a value proposition, and it can not only, again, plan and reach, find all of those audiences, but then measure it. And part of it is that the measurement is in that moment of the campaign. So as you're actually running the campaign, you can see what is becoming more effective. What does that look like? And then change and iterate on the fly. That can also help you to predict what you're going to do next in the next campaign.
So speaking of retention, what is the first step? The first step is finding them and that can be a challenge in and of itself today with cookie deprecation and all sorts of changes in the media landscape. And the second one is providing service across all lifecycles. So whether it's new to a brand, a churned, or somebody who's on second trial, it does not matter. If you actually provide the right service, you can increase retention by 10% to 15%. So that service recovery is really key. What we learned from our study is only 7% of brands are actually creating a personification of an individual based on their service needs. So I would say the second piece of this is how do you identify whether it should be high-touch, low-touch? When I was in the gaming industry, there was definitely a high-touch service for many customers. We called them whales, and they got everything that they wanted, and it was very much one-to-one service with a person. But you might want to have more low-touch digital guidance for some of your personas. You can't be everything to everyone, but what is your service recovery strategy? Not only to acquire customers but also retain them because somebody who's new to the brand also wants service. How do you guide them through that motion? So how are teams doing this today? First, they plan using data from previous activation. So this was paired with machine learning and AI to predict, basically predict in the future, what is my optimal media mix and acquisition strategy? So saying today, I'm going to spend 20 million. Tomorrow, I'm going to only spend 25 million but my mix is going to completely change. I'm going to invest more in Connected TV and retail media networks, but I'm going to get this much more for that and being able to show that to the CFO, which is huge. It's something we've never been able to do before in the past. Second, they expand those reach through partnerships. We talked about collaboration. That's a big deal. So this not only helps with the prospecting piece of it, like finding these audiences out there, but then also suppressing the ones that you don't want to talk to that are in your loyalty database so you're not burning that money. So you get two wins on the efficiency side. One, on finding those new audiences through your partners because sometimes there's not a lot of overlap, and then the second piece is that suppression. So it's a two-part process. And then last, teams, they optimize during a campaign. So instead of waiting for the campaign to be finished and done and then saying, "Okay, how did we do?" You're in that moment and you're running the campaign. You're like, "Hey, this is actually performing better." Let's shift dollars live on the fly so that we can be the most effective that we possibly can. This is completely transformative than where we were before in the past.
So I wanted to show what the existing process flow looks like, and here are some of the specific pain points. So you've got-- Yeah, this entire ecosystem, and you've probably got systems in place right now, processes in place, development cycles in place. And much of this process happens at different levels of the organization and different development cycles. So every group has their own journey, so to speak, in terms of a marketer or a creative person. But this is an ecosystem that there is an opportunity to inflect a new life with this customer acquisition capability. We're not talking about upheaval of this entire process though. We're talking about how do you make an adjunct to this system and improve it. So if you look at the red, those two boxes, so we're talking about campaign brief development, budget channel, and spend planning, audience targeting and strategy, and then that, optimization and measurement piece, that's your customer acquisition motion. The creative development and campaign activation, that is about 50% lift in incremental revenue when you get the campaign right, and that is GenStudio for Performance Marketing. So what I'm sharing with you today is the new piece that basically encompasses that, which is around media measurement, unified collaboration, and incremental media mix modeling so that you have the two pieces. You've got both the content velocity, as well as the media measurement.
And so that strategic collaboration is a big deal and being able to have that unified incrementality, that measurement piece of it, we never been able to do today.
And we give that extra lift through a few different products.
So you've got Customer Journey Analytics, Mix Modeler, and Real-Time CDP Collaboration, which is new here at Summit. The combination of these three things come together to do what we just talked about, which is to provide that incrementality to your CFO to reduce your loss with suppression and also improve overall performance. I'm going to close with a few lessons learned. So customer acquisition costs are not sustainable. 36% growth with 4.5% lift in lifetime value is not sustainable. No one is going to go home and be happy, including the CFO, if that remains. So how do we become more efficient with how we acquire customers is key. AI and ML can very much do this, and it does it through two things. One is that strategic collaboration. It allows a nice seamless way for you to collaborate with partners and exchange and expand your audience reach. Again, that also allows you to suppress at the same time, and then you have that unified incrementality measurement. That second piece of it allows you to then identify what does that mean, again, and do this all on the fly. And it starts with Real-Time CDP Collaboration, Mix Modeler and Customer Journey Analytics. With that, I have the greatest pleasure to invite to the stage Scott Strickland from Wyndham Hotels & Resorts to share his story. Join me in welcoming him.
[Scott Strickland] Thank you so much, Julie. And as we start here, it's actually not my story that I'm fortunate enough to share. It's the story of the team that ultimately made this possible, and some of them are here. So if you're part of the Wyndham team, if you could stand up for just a second, please.
And Adrian, you get to stand up too because you're our Adobe account exec.
Thank you. It really is one of the best parts about this role is that I get to share the narrative, share the story of all of the incredible accomplishments.
As we think about Wyndham and we think about our mission, it originally was to democratize and equalize travel for all. And we decided that was way too many eyes' and too hard to say. So we now say, "We make hotel travel possible for all." And we do so by providing a great value for our guests and for our franchisees. And while we're at it, we have some fun, and that's ultimately what we believe makes the Wyndham brand different.
To really tell the full story, we have to understand our brand offering. We have 25 brands, ranging from a travelodge that might sit right outside a national park to the Wyndham Grand. We saw a picture of it at the very beginning. The Wyndham Grand Jupiter that sits right there on Palm Beach. We have an offering for whatever type of guest and whatever type of journey that they may be on. These brands are set up across the world. We have properties right now in 95 countries, and about 40% of our properties are outside of North America. Our marketing team is getting ready for a 100-country announcement perhaps later this year. We'll have to see as we continue to grow.
We are ultimately right now the world's largest hotel franchiser with more hotels out there than anybody else under the franchise model. As we heard James say this morning for Coca-Cola, franchising is a damn good business when it works for the brand and the franchisee.
We have a number of small business owners here, 6,000 franchisees, who have put their life savings into one of our hotels that have then been able to buy another hotel, whether it's in our brand or not, and expand and send their kids to college and be able to develop personal wealth that is now generational. It really is part of the American dream and the American story.
We grow at 2 hotels a day, every day, 365 days a year, which means we need to have a set of systems, processes, and people that can make that happen. Because if you're opening a new hotel and you just put your life savings into one of these hotels, but you were not being sold on our website the day you opened, or you're not being sold on Expedia, or they can't find you on the app, you just lost money that day. And that's very personal and hurts them. So our systems, processes, and people are working 24/7. Ultimately, we serve three customers. We have about 2,500 or so employees, our team members. We have about 6,000 of those franchisees who own and some of them operate our hotels. And then we have about 650,000 guests that check-in and out of our hotels every day. So that's 650,000 chances to acquire a customer. Julie was talking about the cost of customer acquisition. We have that opportunity every day, and we have a chance to get it right or we have a chance to get it wrong.
And what we're trying to do as much as we can is to standardize that process and standardize that look and feel digitally so that it's not as reliant on that franchisee or that minimum wage front desk agent as they're checking a guest in and out.
How do we do this? We have the commercial engine. And starting there on the right, we have distribution. Distribution means we want to get our product. As Julie was saying, we want to get our product out there to the online travel agencies and to our direct channels on our app, on our web, on the voice channels, wherever it may be. We want to balance that because guests and potential customers exist on all of those channels. We want to sell groups, everything from airline crews to construction crews to, hey, people taking their kids on their volleyball tournament. We're a great set of hotels to stay in for that. And then our loyalty. Our loyalty is a great customer acquisition engine, and anybody with a loyalty program will tell you that. When you think about loyalty, why suddenly does Chick-fil-A have loyalty? Because it's one of the best ways to get to know your customer because they're willing to share data with you that then later you can come back and action upon. And then all of this is enabled by what one may say is a very traditional media marketing awareness campaign, but nowadays can be measured more and more digitally. Let's take a look at one of our recent campaigns. [Man 1] Hey! New door cam you can't sneak up on me. [Man 2] Jimmy let me steal you for five I got an investment for you. [Woman] Here's a cookie. Let's keep moving. Isn't it good? [Man 3] Stay close to family by staying at a hotel by Wyndham instead. Chances are there's one about 10 minutes away. That's got some kick. Try it. Maybe it'll kick some ambition in here.
This love pair feels like a lumbar massage.
What you may have noticed about those ads is they're short, they're quick, they're punchy because they are built for social channels, because they're built for us to put them out on non-linear TV channels where we can measure the impact. And we can determine if we're getting the bang for the buck on that spend and then sometimes can we optimize that spend. In this case, we were not able to because it was a 2.5 to 3-week campaign. We didn't even have a chance to get back in market and make some of those adjustments yet. On our next big campaign, we will because we have made some of the investment that will give us even more real-time data. But it was very successful. Yes, we measure impressions, but we also measure a lift in purchase intent and ultimately, more room revenue and sales for our franchisees.
As I mentioned, loyalty is a great customer acquisition channel. When you think about our loyalty program, right now we have about 114 million members who have willingly given us information about themselves that now we can join with other information and go back out and have personalized offers, which is what I'll speak to here in a moment. We have found that these members have a lifetime value that is at least twice that of non-members. We're seeing it trend up to as high as three to four times as soon as they break a tier level for us. 50 plus percent of our stays are by loyalty members right now, which means it's working and they're coming back.
And then finally, we had a record year last year on customer acquisition with 7.5 million new members coming in, again, giving us that opportunity. We receive awards for the program. They're listed down there at the bottom, but that brings it front of mind for a number of our consumers and guests.
Our loyalty members ultimately have the opportunity to redeem faster. And if you can bring somebody into a hotel and after one stay, they can then use those points to get 15% to 20% off their next stay, they're more likely to stay in your program. Give them a reason to redeem from the very first day.
Don't make them stay 10 times before they have something that's actually valuable. And that's what we're working on is to provide more and more of those partnerships and more of those cash and points options, if you will. I know it seems so simple. It seems really obvious here in terms of what you should or shouldn't do, but it's something that we've grown into here over the years.
"Okay, Scott. You've told us a lot about here's where you're at, here's what Wyndham is doing. What was your burning platform?" Our burning platform ultimately was to increase our direct bookings by 25%. What that means, if you're not in the hospitality industry is we want people to buy on our direct channels on our web via our voice reservation line, via our app.
We wanted them to increase that purchase by 25% over the course of 2 years.
And to get all of this investment, we were silly enough to commit to it.
We went in front of our CFO and the rest of the executive team and said, "We believe that by making these investments in our people, in our process, in our technology, that we will be capable of driving this increase in direct bookings." Ultimately, the reason we felt that we could do that is because we had laid the foundation.
We were among the first in the industry to move our platforms out into the cloud, which means that we could standardize it, which means that as we have 9,000 locations, we don't have 9,000 different systems. What we have is one property management system that then connects into everything else. We have one reservation system that connects into everything else, which means we have one version of the truth. Throughout, we invested in data.
For the past eight years, we've been on a data journey starting at the most basic level and continuing to enrich and build on that overall data platform.
This parallels our journey with Adobe.
Earlier today, we heard Anil take us through actually the entire Adobe journey. And this slide, we had built probably two weeks prior to that. But as he talked about the products and the journey and the evolution that Adobe had been on, it was very similar to ours. If we go back to 2015, when we originally said, "We're going to transform digitally and have one centralized website and platform." That was the first time that Adobe had offered that product.
We then continued to build upon it, to measure it, and to globalize it. We're currently available in eight different languages. We grew through acquisition. We bought La Quinta, and we brought all of those hotels onto that same platform.
Then during COVID, we said, "You know what? We need to improve our app. Right now people don't want to go into a hotel and make a reservation and talk to somebody. They'd rather sit in the parking lot, make that reservation on the app, walk-in, and spend as little time talking to anybody, mask or not." So we doubled down on our app and worked with Adobe on that.
Then in 2023, we said we need to continue to transform, and we invested heavily in the Adobe Experience Manager role overall platform. And we started our AJO and CJA journey as well.
Now coming out of this morning's sessions, there's probably three to five more modules that are on this roadmap, and our Adobe account executive out there is probably already quoting SKUs to some of the folks on my team right now. But we're really excited about where we can go when we think about some of the agentic AI that's out there, some of the site optimization, and some of the things we can do on design as well.
So that's us and where we've been and where we're going in the short term. But let's take a look at the overall guest journey and where these Adobe modules and the learnings plug in. So if you're not familiar with hospitality, this is a pretty standard guest journey. Somebody thinks about staying at a hotel.
They get there. They finally make the booking. They come on property. They leave the property, and then you contact them post-stay and try to convince them to stay at one of your brands again. It's a pretty standard journey. Our goal there is to inspire them. You want them to be inspired by your brands and they consider you in the future. You also want to, throughout, communicate with them. You need to be reaching out to them when they're in the considerations stage, when they're on property and right after they leave.
Here, you probably are going to receive texts that are very tactical in nature. Hey, click here if you want to check out. That's great. That doesn't acquire a customer. But right after you checked out, if you received a survey, how was your stay? Complete the survey, we'll give you 500 loyalty points. Aha! Now I've got you. Now you're going to engage with us. Now you're going to be part, ideally, of our loyalty or ecosystem so we can continue to market to you. So this is the journey right now within hospitality, and we engage with them at points along that journey.
When we think about our successes, they come into two categories. One of them is personalization at scale, which we heard a lot about this morning, and every time I hear that, it still feels like an oxymoron. How can you personalize something at scale? And then on the other side, it's delivery, delivery efficiencies for our team, us being able to do things cheaper or faster.
So let's start with the personalization side.
One of the things we're most proud of was our overall text marketing. So when you think about text marketing, this is engaging for us with people when they're in that inspiration or consideration stage. If you look down to the right here, you can see, "Get away for some self-care at the Wyndham Grand Cancun All-Inclusive Resort & Villas. Click here to book now." There's a call to action.
There's a click-through that we're looking for, and then, ultimately, there's an increased bookings. What we saw here is 30% increase on that click-through itself. We also saw that people loved being texted to. This was a fun way for us to engage with our guests. We can send out little mini surveys. We can say, "Have you considered or I noticed you were considering, please come back," which is where we took it next.
We also offered Wyndham Travel Bundles. What's a travel bundle? It is the ability to book your hotel, your flight, your car rentals and other activities altogether.
Our biggest competitor is not necessarily other brands. It is the online travel agencies. It's the Expedia and the bookings of the world.
If we can offer all of these together and offer them loyalty points when they do this, then we're again, going to acquire that guest and learn more about them. So you can see here, you can earn 10 points for your hotel stays, one point for everything else. Apparently, you get free donuts with that as well, but you also get the data on that guest. So right now, we're the only ones in the industry offering consolidated travel bundles to our guests.
We also offer dynamic collections. So this is, for example, if we see that Adrienne is looking at a set of golf hotels, then we're going to show her more hotels that offer golf or have those similar amenities. We're going to dynamically generate that content and assemble it across our sites.
You can see we'll generate it there on the right and send it back out to her. Then we're going to track what she'd do with it. Did she click on it or did she ignore it or did she now start to look at things that were perhaps more spa related? So again, we're going to learn more about that guest and where they were on that journey.
We also offered pickup where you left off. So this is your standard abandoned cart. But what's cool about this beyond the standard abandoned cart is it drove conversion up 1,300 BPS for us, which means, after they had left, then when we came back and reengaged with them, our conversion went up 1,300 BPS. That is definitely worth reaching back out to that guest and understanding what worked and what didn't. And what was cool about that is when we reach back out, we were able to reach back out in a dynamic manner. So let's take, for example, that starting at the top personalized subject lines.
So Adrienne was out there. She was looking at some of our golf resorts. "Adrienne, come back. Get our lowest price at the Jupiter Beach Golf Resort." Or if we knew that she was a points hound, then we would say, "Come back and get bonus points for booking here." Then we offer tailored contact points. What's that? That is, we'll send it to her via SMS. We'll send it to her via email. We'll send it to her on a channel that we know she's engaging on. We'll also send it at a time that we believe is most appropriate based on our predictive behavior modeling and what she's done for us in the past. Then we're going to have a specific call to action that would be unique to her. In this case, it's finish your booking here. It could be, get an upgrade. It could be, get bonus points. But this is dynamic. This is AI-generated based on the behavior of that guest or that potential customer. What did it do for us? Well, drove up our conversion another 15% and helped us on our abandoned cart campaigns. So start to add these together. Previously, we're at 1,300 BPS on conversion. Here, we're up 15% on conversion. You start adding these up, and suddenly, your website becomes more sticky. Your app becomes more sticky. They multiply here. It's not just one or the other. They all come together and aggregate. This one, we're really-- I mean, we had such great success with it. It still brings a smile to my face.
So let's look internally and talk about some of the AI we used internally.
We launched a Digital Factory.
It's fancy, consultant speak, but what it really means is we partnered with a single partner, we standardized our processes, and we leveraged AI in that development process. We said, "Can we automate our scripts? Can we identify where our scripts are failing? Can we keep people from having to test some of this nonsense stuff and have people test the stuff that really matters such as design or the conversion areas?" And we did. Ultimately, when you look at some of the metrics there, our cost came down by 15%. Our throughput increased over 160%. It worked. The investment more than paid for itself. Again, because we're on that standard platform, we're able to apply these machine learning type tools onto it.
A/B testing. It's a little small on the screen, but here's a very basic example for us of A/B testing where you're identifying room types and rates. In one case, it's in a column. You can see there on the left, it's in a vertical column.
In another case, it's on the right, horizontal. Which one do you think converted more? Who thinks the vertical converted more? We got one person brave enough to raise their hand. Okay. Who thinks the horizontal converted more? I guess that's everybody else. You're right. Actually, the horizontal did convert more. But we had to test it, and we were able to get the data back to be able to see which one was right because otherwise, you're having opinion-based arguments, not database decisions.
Ultimately, you can see that this increased our throughput. We were able to increase our throughput on the A/B testing, but ultimately drove more what we call GRR, Gross Room Revenue. 0.28% may not look like a large number, but when you have 9,200 hotels, it is. So every little bit counts here. Again, just get these small wins, run these A/B tests when they come across. Right before I walked into this room, there was an email that came out from one of our team members that said, "Here's the results of our latest A/B test. We're moving this into production tonight." Those are cycling through now for us on a weekly or biweekly basis, which allows us to continue to make those incremental improvements.
So some of the keys to our success, I've covered. One of them I haven't jumped into a little bit more is our investment overall on the AEM modernization. If you're wondering if it's time to do it or not, I would encourage you to do so. The new platform is just easier. It's easier to use. It's easier to author. It's easier to move things into production. It's easier to support multiple languages, and your internal efficiencies will justify that investment.
You can't do AI. You can't do anything without having your data.
Our data, our unified data model is a work-in progress and it should be a work-in progress for everybody else in this room. Your unified data model should always be evolving. Yes, you're going to have a set of attributes on there, but then you're going to extend those attributes as you learn more about your customer. So you may think you have all your data sources, and I've listed many of them out here to the side. But eventually, you're going to get a new data source, and you're going to need to plug that in and increase your attribute list. So take, for example, our Unified Data Model for our customer. Of course, it's going to have their reservation data. It's going to have their loyalty data. Recently, we added in the call center data. What was their last interaction if they had one with our call center? Are they happy or unhappy with the stay that they had with the hotel? How long were they talking to somebody? Take a look at past reservations. What's their bed type that they normally select? Of course, what loyalty tier number or level are they? But how much do they normally spend as well? What's our predicted lifetime value? All of these things can come together into your data model and can help people make, again, database decisions as they're thinking or interacting with that guest.
It builds out that ultimate personalized guest profile, which allows you to build out the overall journey.
So what we learned? It wasn't as easy as perhaps as we stand up here and talk about it. It wasn't as easy as we maybe made out. First thing is, make the investment to keep your environment synchronized. Don't get them close enough. Get them exact. Because if they're not exact, you're going to learn things in production that you don't necessarily want to learn.
Wherever possible, try to backfill team members or cancel other activities that they're engaged in. Perfect world, I'd be able to go out there, we'd backfill the team members. We'd say, "You just focus on this project. Forget about your day job." I don't know how many people have that budget or able to do it. So what it means is you have to reprioritize or you have to beg and plead with the team members to work longer than they normally would, and you do a bit of both. But you need to create that capacity. Otherwise, it won't be successful.
You need to maintain your scope throughout. Scope creep is the absolute enemy of something this large and this programmatic.
As you have some successes, share them with the organization so that people see the momentum. As you have, for example, an A/B test that is marginally better than the one before, publicize the hell out of it so that people are aware, and then the team gets jazzed, and then they get more momentum. And then finally, encourage folks to experiment. Once you're on one of these new platforms, your ability to fail fast increases dramatically. It's great, but it's a different mindset than we used to have before. So where are we going? Adobe has something called Adobe Ultimate Success.
This is a little bit new for them where they're looking at your organization itself, and they're saying, "Is your organization set up for success? Do you have the roles and responsibilities there?" It's good to leverage them. This is a non-technical offering, but what a great opportunity to get a different point of view on the way you set up your organization.
We're going to be testing some graphics that are enabled by AI. We heard a lot about that this morning, and our design team is really excited about it as well. And then there's an entire marketplace that Adobe offers and that others offer that are third-party offerings that plug into this platform. Use it. That's one of the joys of being on this standardized platform. Go out there and use it.
If we think about the specific modules that are going to be involved, Customer Journey Analytics and Journey Optimization, will both be key for us. We've already started our JO.
This looks a little scary. It's not. On the far left, you have an event. What's the event? They booked at one of our hotels. Great. Next column is what's the profile of that guest who booked? What do I know about that guest? Based on what I know about that guest, what's the channel I should communicate with them on? And then what's my set of offerings in my library that I could execute? So it's basically a decision engine. Here's an event. Here's what I know about the guest. Here's what I'm going to do about it, and we'll see if it works. And it does, by the way. So take, for example, the one at the top. This is a guy. He's come in, he's booked before, and he likes to book rental cars. So what should we offer him? We should offer him a rental car as part of it. At the bottom, you have somebody who is one of those points hounds. Okay, let's offer them an upgrade for points so that they're interested in our hotels because we know that's what their triggers are. We know that's what motivates them.
As I wrap here, we're going to cover two perspectives on the overall customer experience.
The first perspective is from the guest or the customer themselves. If I'm the customer, stage one of this was there was no personalization. It was just a campaign that you were clearly spraying out to everybody. 15% off for everyone. Yay. Not even geography based. Then it gradually evolves into some rules. Okay. Well, if you're in Florida, it's going to be 15% off, but you're from the Midwest, it's only going to be 5% off because you're already coming to Florida anyway.
Then it starts to move into some modeling based on some basic business rules. Right now we are on the edge and into Stage 4, and it depends on the campaign we're running. Some of our campaigns are full Stage 4. Some of them are still right on that edge. What does that look like, though, from a module standpoint? So flipping it on its head a little bit, this is the technology and the various components that we have.
And as I spoke to this, I said earlier, yes, there are new modules we're going to be plugging in here that aren't even listed. But in the short-term, it's CJA and JO, both of which we plug in, in order to reward our guests, our members, our team members, and our franchisees.
So speaking of rewarding, there you go.
This is an opportunity for you to earn 1,500 free points, which is enough for a percentage discount at any Wyndham property around the world. It's also an opportunity to enroll in our loyalty program.
It's our cheapest guest acquisition channel, remember, as well.
But in all seriousness, if you want to see some of the campaigns we're running, this is a great way to see them. Enroll in the loyalty program, you're going to get texted. I'll promise you that. You're going to start to receive some emails perhaps over time. You'll start to see the maturation of our program and what we're doing.
Okay. So with that, we ended perfectly. We wanted to leave some time for questions for either Julie or I, and Julie can certainly join me back. We've met and/or exceeded your expectations today for the session. And I just want to take a moment to thank Scott Strickland and the entire Wyndham team for helping to build out this story on your journey. It's been an absolute pleasure. Well, thank you. And again, if anyone has any questions, please feel free to come up and we can definitely answer those. We will be doing that research study on customer acquisition in the next 60 days. So look for that. It'll be coming out soon. They'll be able to look at all of the deep details in terms of what's happening with customer acquisition. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure having you join us today. Have a great rest of your Summit.
[Music]
