Hilton Hotels has begun using real-time information collected using customer insight technology through its website, to assess missed opportunities that could be worth over $3 million per year.
From April 2008 until January 2009 Hilton Hotels ran a new design of website alongside its current one, diverting random samples of visitors to the new site, so that its usability and the paths through the site could be live-tested.
Using software from Speed-Trap, Hilton was able to capture real-time information on individual visitors´ interaction with the site. This led the hotel chain to identify multiple issues of varying severity and address these customer relationship management issues prior to launching the new site at the start of 2009.
Suniel Curtis, online business analysis manager at Hilton Hotels explained: "We needed to run session monitoring software to enable us to measure the usage trends and the overall conversion through our booking system. We knew that if the data showed conversion rates on the new site were lower, we could then drill down and analyse data on the individual sessions and investigate why.
"One major issue revealed was that on both the old and new sites an incorrect error message was frequently displayed during the booking process. Instead of notifying the customer that a certain room rate was unavailable on the day they selected and re-directing them to select another option, a generic fault message was posted which unintentionally caused visitors to leave the site.
"Using Speed-Trap, we could see precisely how frequently this was occurring, when it was occurring and the resultant loss of the customer. Having fixed this usability problem we could also immediately test and gather data on the results. This error, if it had been left uncorrected, could have led to a potential loss of bookings equating to $3 million per year."
