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Heathrow: A Data Driven Customer Experience
Data and technology driving improved customer experience and business results
Key Objectives
To improve customer satisfaction, rewards membership, and revenue growth for Heathrow and its retailers.
Solution
Heathrow partners with Acxiom for its CRM database, CRM strategy, campaign execution services, post-campaign analytics, and business and marketing intelligence to help the airport leverage its customer data for one-to-one, personalised communications for passengers.
Results
Heathrow saw significant gains year on year from CRM related activity, including:
-
in rewards retail spending
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in membership
-
in active membership
-
in spending per visit
-
in reactivated members
Every year, more than 75 million passengers travel through Heathrow Airport on their way to and from 185 cities.
Heathrow—Europe’s busiest airport—also runs Heathrow Express trains to London and features more than 100 retail and restaurant brands in its terminals. In fact, Heathrow has been named the world’s best airport for shopping—encouraging passengers to plan extra time to shop or dine.
Heathrow, established the motto: “making every journey better”—a customer-centric initiative that goes well beyond actual flights to include travel to and from the airport, foot traffic inside terminals, the airport’s facilities, such as free Wi-Fi, and the online experience of planning a holiday or searching for shops and restaurants using the airport’s mobile app.
Before and during travel, and across the airport’s many business units and operations, Heathrow aims to deliver a smooth, positive experience at every touchpoint.
“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 at Heathrow
Heathrow + Acxiom: a decade-long partnership
Heathrow has partnered with Acxiom for more than a decade for customer insights, hosting, managing and offering strategic direction for the company’s marketing database, which contains more than 25 million records, a number that keeps growing.
Acxiom taps into the marketing database to create audience insights from the wide-ranging data assets available to Heathrow.
Now Heathrow is also working with Acxiom for CRM strategy, campaign planning and execution services, post-campaign analytics, and business and marketing intelligence. This enables Heathrow to leverage its customer data by reacting to customer events in real time and then personalise one-to -one communications with passengers.
The goal: a single view of the customer that drives a better customer experience, grows rewards membership and in turn revenue for all Heathrow business units, including Heathrow Express, official Heathrow parking, Heathrow Boutique and all of Heathrow’s wide-ranging retail concessionaires.
Acxiom taps into the marketing database to create audience insights from the wide-ranging data assets available to Heathrow. Transactional and engagement data come from sources such as Heathrow Rewards, parking transactions, ticketing systems and airport Wi-Fi usage. Using its proprietary identity resolution software, Acxiom collates and consolidates this data into a single customer view and enhances insights from its Personicx® data suite with data such as age, income, employment, demographics, geography and lifestyle.
From there, Acxiom segments the database into groups of similar individuals, enabling the airport to send a highly personalised suite of communications with the objective of growing the value of each customer, acquiring new Heathrow Rewards members, and providing valuable information to each passenger to ensure a smooth journey through the airport.
Touching 9 million customers every month
Enriched data populates Heathrow’s passenger engagement solution, allowing the airport to execute based on data- driven insights. To that end, Acxiom provides the airport with Adobe Campaign—part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud —and strategically, Acxiom also supports Heathrow in capitalising on its investment in the Adobe Marketing Cloud by planning and executing omnichannel communications, notably connecting Adobe Campaign to other aspects of the Adobe tool set.
Data onboarding with LiveRamp, an Acxiom partner, brings CRM, sales and other customer data into other digital platforms. LiveRamp de-identifies and then matches CRM and purchase data to online devices and digital IDs through a secure, automated process that protects consumer privacy. Data segments are then distributed to the airport’s preferred marketing and media platforms for measurement, targeting and one-to-one marketing. This enables Heathrow to deploy online display and eCRM campaigns simultaneously, which has proven to yield a 25% uplift in overall campaign performance than a single channel alone.
The solution helps the airport increase membership in Heathrow Rewards, bookings for official Heathrow car parking, Heathrow Express trains and in-terminal service messaging to ensure a seamless experience when people pass through the airport.
Acquire
Onboard
Activate
Grow
Reactivate
“Customer touchpoints include several websites, our mobile app, and email communications. We’re also developing SMS capabilities.”
— Simon Chatfield
Head of eBusiness and CRM at Heathrow
Every month, Heathrow reaches out to about 9 million customers with communications at every step in the customer lifecycle: acquire, onboard, activate, grow and reactivate.
The enterprise-wide marketing database, combined with Acxiom’s proprietary identity resolution technology, enables Heathrow to recognise prospective and existing rewards members to direct the appropriate communications to passengers.
Surprising and delighting customers
Heathrow gives travellers tools and prompts to help them plan ahead for things such as parking, terminal navigation, dining and shopping. A family planning a holiday might receive several touches tailored to their specific journey, for example:
- Reminders to complete a parking reservation or join the rewards program
- Special offers for shops and restaurants in the terminal from which they will be flying
- License plate recognition in the car parks, automatically prompting the barrier to open, simultaneously triggering a communication to welcome the passenger to the airport
With each interaction and transaction, the airport gathers more about customers, enabling ever more personalised communications.
Raising membership, revenue
With a highly personalised approach, Heathrow saw significant gains year over year from CRM-related activity, including:
22%
increase in Rewards retail spending
19%
growth in membership
20%
growth in active membership
23%
increase in spending per visit
34%
increase in reactivated members
“We aim to offer our customers a rich and varied experience, tailored to their specific needs. By connecting our data with retailers, airlines, and other partners’ assets, we are able to recognise, better understand and creatively engage the growing number of customers who visit Heathrow each year.”
— Simon Chatfield
Head of eBusiness and CRM at Heathrow
Connecting Heathrow’s passenger engagement solution to the wider enterprise, including CRM
Heathrow continues to work with Acxiom on future developments, and leveraging Acxiom’s open garden approach to technology integration, the airport will connect customer service teams and wider frontline staff to the rich data assets in the passenger engagement solution to transform the experience customers will receive as they make embark on their business trip or holiday.
