inside heathrow’s incredible customer experience operation · inside heathrow’s incredible...

Inside Heathrow’s Incredible Customer Experience OperationA closer look at the transformative marketing operation that turned 76 million anonymous passengers into happy customers.

“The airport, parking operations, train service, and retail are all separate business units. But customers see Heathrow as one entity. If they interact with one part of the business, they expect the other parts to know who they are and what they need.”

Simon Chatfield Head of eBusiness and CRM Heathrow Airport Limited

When we travel through an airport, our experience is usually pretty straightforward. From plane to bag to train or cab—or vice versa. But behind that, airports themselves are anything but straightforward. They’re sprawling, complex webs of people, technology, processes and more data than you can imagine.

Heathrow is one of the most dynamic airports in the world. Every year, 76 million people move through it on their way to one of 194 destinations in 82 countries. That’s 76 million interactions with some combination of Heathrow’s car parks, express trains, terminals, and one of the largest retail outlets in Europe.1

It’s complicated.

The people-based airport

’76 million passengers make 2016 a Heathrow record’, 11 January, 2017:

https://your.heathrow.com/76-million-passengers-make-2016-a-heathrow-record/

Inside Heathrow’s Incredible Customer Experience Operation 2

A customer experience imperative

Heathrow’s challenge is to create a symbiosis between its retail outlets and travellers. They need to drive footfall to shops and restaurants, but only as part of an onward journey to a plane. Heathrow's main priority is for you to make your flight safely and securely, but they also want customers to enjoy a great retail experience en route. This is about marketing not to and at customers, but for and with them.

Heathrow needs to deliver a world-class customer experience and to do that, it has to unite all aspects of the business around a central view of the opportunity presented by a customer moving from train, to shop, to plane.

Getting it right means greater revenue, happier customers and more return visits. Getting it wrong means being just another airport.


The scale of this challenge is massive. First, there’s the sheer volume of people— 206,800 daily visitors—and the incalculable variations in their opinions, tastes, wants and needs. Even the same person will want completely different experiences depending on whether they’re travelling for work or with family.

Then there’s the complexity of having several separate businesses, each with their own priorities, comprising hundreds of shops and restaurants and parking spaces and lounges and gates—not to mention planes.

And finally, there’s the problem of time. Unlike most retail spaces, these shoppers aren’t free to browse at their leisure. Heathrow has a precise window of opportunity in which to act, or they’re gone.

Despite the challenges, Heathrow has transformed itself from an exciting yet fragmented cluster of businesses into an ecosystem that delivers highly personalised, near-real-time, seamless customer experiences. It’s gone from reactive to predictive, from blind to measurable, and with continuous improvement.

How?

The complexity of being Heathrow

Taste WantsWork

Business

Shops Shops

Restaurants

Needs

Parking Gates Departures

Family

Lounge206,800 daily visitors


• By using Identity Resolution to recognise unique individuals even when they’re anonymous

• By integrating and putting to work leading technologies

• By creating a foundational layer of privacy-compliant customer data that’s available to the separate businesses

• By using that data to react in real- time, and using the value delivered to customers by all of this to earn greater trust, and therefore more data

• And finally, by incorporating the newest, neatest tricks, like geo-fencing for location awareness

This is a story of marketing transformation against considerable odds. And while Heathrow’s team are its heroes, the wider implications for marketers are huge.

This is a prime example of how data and technology can meaningfully transform customer experiences and drive better, measurable outcomes.

This eBook is about how they did it, the results they’ve achieved and what this all means for ambitious marketers like you.

Here’s how:


An ecosystem that can sense and respond


Whether you’re a frequent flyer or just passing through, when you’re in Heathrow, you’re interacting with an omnichannel marketing ecosystem that’s able to sense and react to you in near-real time.

Interactions with known customers are hyper-relevant, tailored and timed to perfection. But even if the only thing it knows is that you’re using the free WiFi, this ecosystem can still guide you towards a great experience. For Heathrow, the challenge is to deliver the best experience to you, no matter how anonymous you choose to be.

Here’s what the ecosystem looks like in action.

An ecosystem that can sense and respond


What the system knows:

• Someone who isn’t a member of Heathrow Rewards has just entered the airport and crossed the geo-fence. They have been identified as anonymous ID 9231.

• It’s the third visit to Heathrow Airport this month for ID 9231 so, even though the person is anonymous, the system knows they’re a frequent traveller.

What the system does:

• Based on the time they crossed the geo-fence the system estimates they have 60 minutes to kill before their flight.

• They’re sent a welcome back communication, with offers based on how frequently they travel and which terminal they’re in.

I. Person ID 9231



• Heathrow Rewards member Rebecca Ward loves Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant. The entrance barrier camera at the Heathrow car park just recognised her car number plate, as she pre-booked her parking.

What the system does

• Since the barrier recognised Rebecca’s car number plate, it automatically let her in to the car park.

• The system sends Rebecca a map to the terminal for her flight.

• It waits 15 minutes—enough time for Rebecca to get to the terminal—before sending a “Welcome to Heathrow” email with a tailored offer for 15% off at Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant, for use today only. The voucher is downloadable to Apple Wallet.

• When Rebecca uses her coupon at the restaurant, she earns more Heathrow Rewards points. Rebecca then chooses to redeem those points immediately with a last-minute purchase when she goes shopping at World Duty Free.

II. Rebecca Ward



• Heathrow Rewards member Mr. Ward is browsing Heathrow.com, having clicked through from a Rewards newsletter.

What the system does

• It knows most passengers visit the Heathrow.com website approximately two weeks prior to travel, so 13 days after Mr Ward’s visit he’s sent a personalised email with offers for a variety of airport outlets.

• Each offer is tailored to Mr Ward’s preferences and purchase history (both value and lifestyle category).

• As soon as Mr Ward arrives at the airport and crosses the geo-fence, Heathrow recognises him in real-time and sends him a map to his gate.

• After his trip Mr Ward receives a survey about his experience, and the answers go on to inform Heathrow’s customer satisfaction score.

III. Mr. Ward


Here, the challenge is twofold: To help customers get from parking or Heathrow Express to the terminal, lounge and gate as easily as possible; and provide a customer experience so engaging that it inspires them to making a purchase or two.

As you’ve probably guessed, getting it right means synchronising a lot of moving parts. So now let’s look at the technology powering all this insight and action.


Rising to the technical challenge


Heathrow’s vision is to make every journey better. That means delivering a great experience for every customer at every touchpoint. It may sound like the kind of thing every retailer wants to do, but it’s worth remembering the scale at which Heathrow operates.

Heathrow’s challenge is to deliver people-based marketing to millions of passengers—each of whom has more than 100 business partners to choose from—across four different terminals. To do this, the team at Heathrow need to be able to knit together data from 23 disparate data sources (and counting) and over 200 touchpoints.

When this project began, Heathrow had a relatively simple CRM program that sent monthly email newsletters to Heathrow Rewards members about new routes, shops and other announcements. Since they only had names and email addresses, personalisation opportunities were limited. More important, all this data was tied to one system (their email service provider).

Heathrow knew it needed a technology overhaul. But one thing was right at the top of the agenda. They had to address the elephant in the departure lounge: different parts of Heathrow had different views of the same customers.

Rising to the technical challenge


Key customer data assets from different business units—Heathrow Express, Rewards, Parking and Retail—were pooled to form the foundational data layer. This personally identifiable information (PII) is sourced primarily from pre-booked events: everything from train tickets and personal shopping right through to foreign exchange transactions and requests for baby formula.

Building it meant that for the first time, the team could see how passengers were interacting with the brand right across the business. It also meant they could create better reports for sales and management. Most important, it meant customers who pre-booked events were greeted as expected guests.

Three years later, Heathrow extended their technology stack by integrating this single customer view with Adobe’s Marketing Cloud software—a stack that’s now home to the rules on how to sense and react to customer behaviour.

With a clear link between the single customer view and real-world events, the team at Heathrow had set themselves up to respond to all their passengers in near-real time. They’d gone from sending one monthly newsletter to automatically triggering over 70 personalised campaigns every month.

Today, Heathrow has connected enough information and insight into their customers’ behaviour to be able to personalise everybody’s experience to a meaningful extent, from the highest value Rewards member right through to the non-members who just want a sandwich, a coffee and access to free WiFi.

In fact, it can even change the content of a message depending on when it is read; after all, you don’t want to invite someone to get a great offer in a terminal they left three hours earlier. Sometimes a simple 'Thank you for choosing Heathrow' is all that's needed.

This way, every transaction generates a positive reaction.

Building Heathrow’s first single customer view


Great data reveals great nuance

The amazing thing about Heathrow’s data and technology is that it’s showed them details they would’ve previously missed.

For instance, a frequent traveller who’s signed up to the Rewards scheme might travel to the airport six times a year on the Heathrow Express, and occasionally treat themselves to a luxury item. A Rolex watch, perhaps, or a tasteful Prada handbag.

On the face of it, this is a very different customer from the one who visits every fifteen months, books into a long-stay car park and spends much less.

The thing is, they’re the same person. In the first case, you have the passenger’s activity when they’re travelling alone for work. In the second, you have their activity when they’re travelling with their family.

With a unified dataset, Heathrow can now see hugely valuable insights like these, delivering different messages and offers depending on the customer’s circumstances and mindset. You may be the same person, but you’re going to have a very different experience of an airport when you’ve got two restless kids by your side.

1 2 3


Flexible Interfaces

Passenger Lookup API (OData)

Adobe Marketing Cloud

Heathrow Single Customer view (Helix)

Tableau BI reporting

Engaging with relevance

Customer service interactions

Sensing customer interactions

data warehouse

Flexible Interfaces

a) Data file load b) Near real-time APIs

c) Real-time APIs Slow data

Fast data

Inside the marketing technology stack

Acxiom data quality,

recognition & data mgmt.

Acxiom marketing data

integration

Acxiom LiveRamp

Apple Wallet/ Passport

integration

Adobe Target

Adobe Analytics

Adobe Social

Adobe Campaign

Data Analyses in the language

of SAS


Metrics, mutual benefit and fancy watches


Well before Heathrow had smart car-park barriers and geo-fences, the team understood the value of personalisation.

Members of the Heathrow Rewards programme spend, on average, three times as much per visit as a non-member. The symbiosis between customer experience and Retail revenues is therefore pretty clear. The question for Heathrow was how to maximise the value of that mutual benefit to both business and consumer.

The answer lies in the metrics the Heathrow team chose to focus on.

In order to deliver even a basic level of personalisation, they needed to segment their audience and choose the metrics most likely to reward both customer and marketer. But an audience of 76 million is likely to have a fairly diverse set of interests, habits and favourite things to eat before going on holiday. So this was no small task.

Heathrow adopted a whole range of key performance indicators, but three of them are especially useful when it comes to understanding how they maximise this mutual benefit: average transaction value, spend per visit and cross-category spend.

These KPIs reflect the reality of how people shop. Everybody has their favourite things, but everybody also has a spending limit. Focusing only on increasing people’s spending would have been a narrow-sighted move that made for a predictable and repetitive customer experience.

Instead, those three KPIs, in conjunction with many more, work to find a balance between what customers want and what the retailers want.

Metrics, mutual benefit and fancy watches

Average transaction value

Spend per visit

Cross-category spend


Take the example of a regular customer who likes nice watches. Make that really nice watches. Heathrow knows she won’t repeatedly buy the Cartier timepiece that made her a high-value customer in the first place. But she is likely to make other high-value purchases, such as personal shopping experiences, premium lounge access, a pre-flight glass of Champagne (there’s no shortage of options for travelling in style).

Since she’s already a big spender in one category, the system will prioritise cross-category spend, and send her tailored offers for items and experiences in a similar spending bracket, albeit in a separate category. Their incentive is not just to spend more, but to explore more. And it’s not just that they received an offer—they also just discovered there’s a Fortnum & Mason in Terminal 5. Even better, there’s a Champagne bar inside.

Meanwhile, frequent high-street clothes shoppers might receive an offer for their favourite outlet, or a notification of the new season collection at Burberry. Even sandwich-and-coffee guy gets 20% off food at a restaurant when he’s back for the third time this year.

Heathrow wants to get happy customers onto flights. Customers who’ve had a great experience and who, ideally, have made a purchase or two. This way, everyone wins.


Data-driven culture change


Data-driven culture change

Fusing data and technology in this way had another effect, this time on the internal workings of the business itself.

Before the start of this programme and like any large organisation, Heathrow encountered siloes and lacked cross-functional communication.

But with the creation of a centralised database, suddenly, everyone was looking at the same thing—those customers were real people with preferences and plans. Cross-functional communication went from being a chore to being strategically essential.

The marketing and brand teams now had access to the single customer view and its segments, making clear the value of delivering tailored brand messages to a pre-defined audience.

In fact, even Heathrow’s agencies and publishers now connect to the customer data. Overnight, they could see who their best segments were and how best to target them. All because, for the first time, they could link offline first party data to the display advertising network.

The single customer view was created to ensure customers got one, connected customer experience from what seemed like one, connected brand.

As it turned out, Heathrow didn’t just start looking more like a cohesive brand. It started acting like one too.


An Open Garden philosophy


Everything we’ve covered so far—the technology, the experience it creates, and the cultural shift that came with it—is part of a much greater whole.

With Acxiom, the team at Heathrow have designed their marketing stack, processes and capabilities based on an approach that gives them an incredible level of flexibility.

It’s called Open Garden.

It means they can use the right data and technology to drive value to the customer and their business. It means they aren’t wedded to specific technologies or channels. It means the stack is modular and the software leverages standards and APIs, so there are minimal barriers to entry for agencies and publishers. And it means Heathrow can pool first-, second- and third-party datasets, managed in a privacy-compliant manner, to get a complete picture of customer behaviour, and distribute this data to where it’s needed to enrich every customer interaction.

An Open Garden philosophy


This privacy-compliant, future-proofed, modular approach to the single customer view is the Open Garden philosophy.

It’s about getting the right data and technology to work together in a way that makes a difference to the customer.

Open Garden is an approach to marketing intelligence and operations that prioritises flexibility, privacy and marketing effectiveness.

To make Open Garden work, you need six things:

• Identity resolution so you can connect the right data to real people for maximum relevance

• Deep understanding through first-, second- and third-party data

• Connectivity with publishers and platforms to connect with people everywhere

• Closed-loop analytics to continuously measure and improve marketing effectiveness

• Trust, built from holistic, privacy-compliant practices

• Governance to maximise the value of your data and to minimise risk

Heathrow’s Open Garden allows it to deliver extraordinary levels of personalisation to its customers. It means its agencies and publishers have unprecedented insight into which segments they should target with their design and media-buying strategies. And crucially, it removes the barriers between separate businesses.


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An Open Garden in action

In order to fully understand the value of an Open Garden approach, it helps to consider the Heathrow Rewards loyalty programme. It’s hugely successful, and the largest scheme of its type anywhere in the world.

But the programme still only comprises 3.3% of all travellers. After all, loyalty programmes aren’t for everybody. So, rather than delivering personalised offers and experiences only to these comparatively few select passengers,

Heathrow’s Open Garden allows it to also better understand and interact with the remaining 96.7%.

As a result, Heathrow can nudge these people towards joining the loyalty scheme while simultaneously creating loyalty within each product line, by making the right offers in the right moments, such as when you’ve parked or signed up for WiFi.

Whether or not you’re a member, Heathrow can still give you the level of customer experience you need to remember them.


Conclusion: Learning from Heathrow’s people-based approach


Learning from Heathrow’s people-based approach

The sheer scale of Heathrow’s customer experience operation is impressive enough.

But when you consider the fact that this team has gone from sending a monthly newsletter to rolling out fully fledged personalisation to millions of people every year, often in real-time, it’s hard not to be amazed.

In laying the foundations for a unified, centralised view of every customer, no matter which business unit they’re dealing with, Heathrow have completely changed the way they interact with and understand visitors.

The Open Garden approach allows Heathrow to turn the complex reality of multiple businesses spread across 1,227 hectares serving 76 million annual customers entirely to its advantage. Its very openness in terms of connectivity and compliance drives great customer experiences for Heathrow Rewards

members and non-members alike. At the same time, it aligns every line of business around a common view and goal, connecting data and using people-based insights to inform interactions.

Heathrow continues to expand its Open Garden philosophy to airlines, other partners and frontline staff, and not just to make lives easier for their marketers. The more important thing is that the most relevant marketing reaches more travellers at the right times.

This story is a testament to the massive difference great data and smarter technology can make to both a business’ top line and its travellers’ experiences.

It’s through this marketing that Heathrow is able to demonstrate a deep knowledge of what its customers want. What’s more, the team knows that “want” is only partly monetary.

Because before knowing about the newest restaurants and what’s on offer, all of us want to know the best route to the gate and where our plane is up to. By delivering on all these fronts, Heathrow are marketing with and for their customers—and that’s why their customers say yes.


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