With deep domain expertise as practitioners, coupled with rich experience as multi-channel marketers, Merkle has a unique combination of capabilities and experiences that shape our Travel, Media & Entertainment (TME) practice.  The Merkle team is ready to tackle the challenges within your business today, to help you run it more effectively. To lay a foundation for truly changing your business as customer’s expectations evolve and marketing capabilities mature. To drive immediate and sustained business results.

More than ever, travel, media & entertainment companies are realizing that building and maintaining relationships with end consumers is key to generating growth and vital to brand building in the digital era.  Empowered and engaged customers, the need for personalized experiences, and the challenges of integrating the customer experience require partners, like Merkle, that are adept at distilling insights from multi-channel data and interactions and turning those insights into growth platforms. 

Our capabilities are specifically designed to partner with multi-channel and brand marketers to drive insights that build relevant and engaged experiences for customers over the life of their relationship. Results are optimized based on the value and intelligence generated via the specific engagement patterns and behavior.

Technology – We design, build and deploy global marketing environments that are focused on integrating multi-channel consumer interactions and transactions.  Our technology solutions are customer-centric, allowing marketers to see, understand and engage with customers at all points of interaction. Whether a customer is shopping for a vacation experience online, having a conversation with a call center agent, or experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime vacation at a luxury resort, Merkle’s solutions enable organizations to understand, analyze and project what will be most engaging for customers. This ensures that the customer experience remains relevant over time – driving loyalty and advocacy for a lifelong relationship.

Insights – Customer analytics, segmentation, reporting and measurement are core competencies of Merkle. Insights form the basis for driving engagement and building customer loyalty and brand advocacy. The TME practice at Merkle combines deep domain expertise with strong multi-channel marketing competency, to ensure insights are leveraged for tangible and achievable outcomes, with the customer at the center of the insight universe aimed at driving relevant and valuable action. 

Marketing programs – The intersection of insights with a flexible and multi-channel technology environment can generate truly differentiated marketing programs, when applied at the right time, with the right focus and overarching strategy, and with a clear measurement plan in place. At Merkle, we are customer marketers who are experienced at leveraging assets to create and deploy multi-channel programs. that drive acquisition and engagement; activate the brand to build share; and ensure that an integrated, programmatic approach across channels is driving real and measureable business value. We test, we learn, we tweak, and then we do it again, all focused on the right results grounded in the strategy and blueprint for success. Our rigorous analytic and measurement focus provides our clients with a unique perspective that helps them optimize their marketing spend and understand the ROI of their initiatives.

Getting Started
Picking a starting point among all the options is often the hardest part of implementing true CRM in most organizations. Based on our experience in implementing holistic CRM at scale in mid-sized to large organizations, here is an overview of our best practices approach.

Prepare the organization for the journey
CRM, in its most impactful form, will present transformation challenges to most organizations regardless of size. Truly customer-centric companies are relatively rare in our experience. A few key areas will need to be addressed to get the organization ready for a CRM initiative:

• CRM transformation takes collaboration across the organization. Creating an integrated view of and voice to the customer will require technology initiatives, governance forums and process, disciplined planning and frequent and transparent communications.
• Organizations will want to develop cross-functional steering and project groups that have accountability for planning, the span of control to drive through obstacles and for adhering to the business cases that support the initiative. 
• Often new sets of metrics must be developed and tracked. The cross functional team should accountability for that and to hold each other accountable to new measures.

Get to know your customer
One of the most difficult yet foundational of all CRM competencies is to create an integrated view and understanding of your customer. Many companies make the mistake of thinking of this as purely a technology issue. While technology and data integration will be a big component of the work, truly understanding what motivates and drives customer engagement is key to this phase.

• If the organization has a good customer segmentation schema, that is a great start – hopefully it is based on behavior, attitude and has a value dimension as well.
• Make sure that as new customers are acquired you have the data necessary to properly assign them to the right segments. In our experience, many times the largest customer segment in an organization is “unknown” or default. 
• A focused strategy to collect and integrate and model information on customer preferences, favorites, interaction and communication channels they prefer will enable better targeting and relevant communications and offers that improve the overall experience and exceed customer expectations.
• A flexible technology architecture is paramount in the design phase of knowing your customer. It is relatively straightforward to identify and map the sources of customer interactions today. The travel industry typically uses booking information as the primary way to track customer actions. While this is a great starting point in your CRM effort, it still does not provide a complete picture on all your customers’ preferences and activities.
• Data will need to be collected and stored across a wide variety of systems throughout the operational, marketing and loyalty areas. To be relevant in the long term, though, an organization must plan for tomorrow – if they aren’t already critical, are social networks and mobile going to be important channels in the future? Planning today will save time and money going forward.