How Travel Brands Can Take Flight with Digital Experience Analytics

The online travel economy has had to evolve rapidly and continues to do so in order to match the demands of modern consumers. With the prevalence and easily accessible public forums such as review websites and social media, travelers are quick to openly express frustrations regarding their digital experience that can tarnish a brand’s reputation. But in an increasingly competitive market combined with the high stakes of online experience expectations, how can a travel brand stay on top?

The answer seems obvious given the acceptance that the consumer holds all the power: excellent customer experience. But what is obvious is not always easy. According to McKinsey, companies continue to prioritize business requirements ahead of the needs of their customers. This is often because brands lack the visibility into what their customers are actually experiencing and further do not know how that correlates to business impact.

With the proper digital experience analytics platform, travel companies can better understand how customers are interacting with their site, where they are struggling, what is causing the struggle and how much that is costing them. These insights can help prioritize what should be addressed first to smooth customer experience and match business needs.

Managing Digital Complexity

Travel websites have billions of variables that customers personally tailor for their own individual journeys. How do you test every form, feature, page aspect, etc. at all times to ensure they are working properly? You can’t. 

To stay ahead of the problems and not drown in the onslaught of customer complaints, travel brands require a digital experience analytics platform with machine intelligence in order to automatically highlight areas of user frustration, errors, and anomalies on their site. But what to address first? These issues need to be prioritized by how much of a financial impact they have on the business so that those with the greatest effect on revenue are identified and resolved first.

Sometimes travel organizations already know of an important issue due to customer support tickets but struggle to reproduce the error and understand how to solve for it. For example, online marketplace TravelPass Group has testers scouring their site for errors but were missing many of the issues their customers were. Using Quantum Metric’s analytics and session replay, the company was able to understand, reproduce, and solve a bug that was affecting 30% of their users and leading to lower conversion rates.  It goes without saying, it was costing them real revenue as well.

Mobile Coverage

Many customer experience solutions address website optimization, but today more and more users are turning to mobile devices as their platform of choice whether it be accessing mobile web or mobile apps. It is critical that travel brands gain an understanding and visualization of how customers are experiencing their mobile site and applications in order to improve it. With digital experience analytics for mobile, brands can ask themselves important questions like:

• How do our mobile conversions compare to web?
• Are there specific challenges or bugs that customers are facing via mobile that they may not be in a traditional desktop browser environment?
• What do my customers actually see when utilizing our mobile app?

Posing these questions can help travel companies identify areas of weakness that may be hindering their mobile customer journey.

Finding the right tools can make all the difference to improving the digital experience for travel companies. With change as the only constant and customer experience as the key to success, it is crucial that travel brands arm themselves with the proper platforms to help them rise above in digital optimization.

Curious how travel companies can save millions with digital experience analytics? Read our full TravelPass Group case study.