Accor Develops a Customer Data Platform For More Effective Marketing Campaigns

Accor deploys one of the most diversified ecosystems in the industry, with over 45 hotel brands ranging from luxury to lifestyle to economy. With over 5,700 hotels, 10,000 restaurants and bars, as well as wellness and coworking spaces in more than 110 countries, the group is reinventing hospitality by offering much more than classic accommodation: unique, personalized experiences for every guest. At the heart of this ambition, data plays a key role.

As part of the overhaul of its marketing operations, Accor has undertaken to strengthen segmentation and improve targeting of its customers and prospects thanks to a Customer Data Platform (CDP). The aim: to offer an ever more personalized experience.

Using Snowflake and its existing data models, Accor deployed a composable CDP from the Hightouch solution within two months. 

As part of the overhaul of its marketing operations, Accor moved from a strictly regional approach to a matrix organization, combining Premium, Midscale, & Eco brands managed by geographical hubs on the one hand, and Luxury brands managed individually at global level on the other. Global marketing teams were also looking to refine their targeting by improving message personalization, to make their actions more effective.

“Snowflake was selected as the technical data platform for Accor in 2019,” recalls Jean-François Guilmard, Chief Data Officer at Accor. “This unified data platform certainly played a key accelerator role for the CDP project.”

Accor evaluated several vendors and their solutions to develop its CDP, based on criteria such as value proposition, technical soundness, vision, roadmap and customer feedback. The question quickly arose as to whether to opt for a classic CDP or a composable CDP, particularly in view of the Snowflake technical stack already in place and the associated data centralization. Taking all these criteria, along with its native modularity into account, Accor chose the Hightouch CDP solution.

The data team then created a proof of concept (POC) based on a specific use case that the business team had defined: helping to define, among existing customers and identified prospects, those who might have an appetite for luxury hotels. This segmentation was previously impossible because the criteria were not fine enough in their existing tool. With that, they evaluated the new modular CDP, built on the Snowflake platform. “Familiarization, capabilities and results obtained came so fast that over the period given for our POC, we were able to test two other use cases, and thus involve many more business colleagues,” Guilmard says.

With the data team’s experience on Snowflake and the data models that it had already developed, Accor was able to put the Hightouch CDP on Snowflake into production only two months after the initial tests.

As a result, work on the data model is intensifying to integrate new attributes into the records of each business unit, each of which has its own data and connectors. The idea is to develop connectors adapted to the digital platforms specific to each activity. The aim of this work is to achieve two objectives: firstly, the most precise segmentation possible to ensure ultra-personalized messages, and secondly, a shared global vision of contacts to enable unified and harmonized digital processes worldwide.

“We trained over 200 people in total, and we are organizing monthly meetings to ensure follow-up and continuity in adopting the platform for new uses,” Guilmard says. Marketing teams now can run queries in the customer’s database and love the ability to augment insights from the platform with third-party data.

That has saved valuable time, too: a request to the data team isolating a specific segment ready for a campaign used to take three weeks — now the marketing teams can do it directly themselves in just a few days. This means they gain flexibility, and cut the time needed to roll out campaigns. The performance of marketing campaigns also benefits the new CDP: better targeting minimizes costs while making acquisition, loyalty and retention more efficient. 

“The CDP gives us immediate optimization of our marketing budgets,” Guilmard says. “A fast, positive result, owing to the modular nature of the CDP, and above all to the existing Snowflake technology stack upstream.”

After several months in use, the modular CDP is already opening up new prospects for the Accor for several workstreams. Third-party data integration will continue to enhance the enterprise’s understanding of its customers, as well as help improve segmentation and address target prospects. Accor also will be able to implement more real-time uses, such as informing a guest of activities tailored specifically to their interests at check-in. 

Above all, the future integration of artificial intelligence will be the basis for Accor’s data approach in the coming years. “Increasing the volume of data is only worthwhile if it delivers value for the business,” Guilmard emphasized. “In this respect, AI can greatly increase the value of the data, and today we are working hand in hand with the group’s AI team to define new indicators, such as a brand affinity score, and the commercial pressure score. There are just as many challenges ahead, and new data to be created thanks to AI, while relying on the solid and stable platform formed by Hightouch and Snowflake.”