Empowering Pricing & Revenue Management with Actionable Data

A highly experienced Pricing & Revenue Management department was unable to capitalize on revenue opportunities because they couldn’t move from raw data to actionable insights fast enough to make an impact. Although they were armed with terabytes of data and sophisticated technology, extensive manual effort was required for them to combine historical and forward-looking bookings with both sold and flown revenue sources. The department was spending an excessive amount of time stitching data together with fragile, nightly processes on end-user desktops. At least once a week, a part of these processes would fail, leaving revenue managers without critical daily reporting and diverting data science resources from analytics to fixing errors and rebuilding reports.

PARTNERS worked closely with the client’s PRM Intelligence team to develop a unified data model across inventory, forecasting and sales data. PARTNERS also built new automated ETL to replace problematic desktop processes, and all available historical data was reprocessed to deliver a completely cleansed and unified data layer. The new data layer was automated with multiple intra-day updates based on source availability, keeping reports fresh and providing analysts with direct access to any underlying data for ad-hoc, deep-dive investigation.

Through organizational efficiencies and revenue optimization, client realized 9.5x return on its initial four-month investment

In four months, the airline accelerated its PRM data strategy and by sunsetting dozens of local user databases and moving to a unified Commercial Data Layer, they gained access to higher quality insights that were previously unavailable. The PRM Intelligence team could now capitalize on new optimization strategies. Its ability to monitor forecast accuracy became sharper. Through organizational efficiencies and improved revenue optimization, the client realized a 9.5x return on its initial four-month pilot investment.

Eighteen months later, the client’s PRM Intelligence team has grown more valuable to the airline, and with that value has come additional investment. A data science team that started with only a manager and a few analysts is now a team of twelve and growing. Since the original data layer project, PARTNERS and the client have deployed multiple rapid enhancements: adding new data sources like market share and competitive pricing and integrated the Commercial Data Layer with other data warehouse subject areas like Loyalty and Operations.

All of these enhancements and integrations were designed and deployed in a matter of months, not years. In the end, PARTNERS not only accelerated the client’s ability to act on their data but also helped set a new standard for the speed at which the company could expect future commercial BI solutions to be mobilized.

Powering Marketers to go from Concept to Campaign in Record Time

A promotion-heavy airline needed a sophisticated marketing intelligence program that went beyond their current marketing methods and capabilities. Its rigid email marketing program sent the same offer to its entire customer base regardless of customer demographics, behavior, purchase history or other variables that could vastly improve response rate. Offers became dilutive because they weren’t relevant to most customers.

The company also lacked an agile marketing platform and depended heavily on the availability of the technology resources to program each individual email blast which led to a multi-day turnaround each time the marketing team wanted to implement a campaign. As a result, the client was unable to respond to competitor sales or fill flights with last-minute offers. By the time the email hit customer inboxes, the offer was irrelevant. With each irrelevant, mis-timed email, customers became less likely to open the next one. Open rates, clickthrough rates, and conversion rates plummeted—degrading channel effectiveness for future campaigns.

The client sought a new email marketing platform that gave their marketing team control over segmentation, messaging, timing and cadence; they wanted to gain a better understanding of their customers and use those understandings to drive marketing across, not only email, but the full digital marketing spectrum.

Within 90 days, PARTNERS helped the client select, negotiate, and implement a best-in-class campaign management platform that enabled personalized marketing tethered to customer data. Three months after implementation, the client was sending out personalized, targeted emails triggered by unified commercial data—capabilities that exponentially surpassed any of their marketing tactics in the prior years.

Personalized Marketing Based on Customer Data

Having the right offer, to the right customer, at the right time drove a 49% increase in open rates, 382% increase in click rates and a 675% increase in conversion rates while reducing its unsubscribe rate by 37%. Later, PARTNERS helped the client to link email behavior with digital campaigns in social media channels to find and re-engage customers that had stopped opening promotional emails. Most impressively, after implementing a test and learn program to drive targeting based on customer price sensitivity, the client saw a 3.4% increase in the average fare purchased from its email-subscriber base by finding which customers needed and which customer didn’t need a discount in order to convert.

Accelerating Transformation Through Common Framework

In order to deliver upon aggressive commercial goals, our client needed to find a way to integrate numerous modern and legacy IT systems while accelerating delivery timelines and maintaining quality. To be successful required a strong understanding of the unique combination of IT systems necessary to run the day-to-day business while concurrently building a framework that modernized execution.

With our comprehensive knowledge of the travel space, we were able to rapidly help our client define a common framework capable of delivering against near term needs while concurrently enabling future growth and adaptability. This new common framework allowed the client to remove duplication of logic and points of integration, enable faster business process changes and reduce the overall complexity and cost of IT.

Architecture to Enable Agility, Strategic Control, and Consistent Results

Within 60 days of our engagement, PARTNERS delivered the necessary technical assets, documentation, cloud-based deployment practices, and roadmap necessary to establish the common technology framework needed to enable futureforward integrations while transitioning existing capabilities intelligently over time based on value.

Having the right architecture and a clear roadmap lead to kicking off a technology transformation that continues to fuel a consistent delivery practice, aligned business outcomes, and a unified technology roadmap.