Building the Right Team and Structure to Drive Conversions

For any platform in the consumer tech domain, offering a personalised user experience is a core focus—the more personalised, the more delightful, the consumer experience. 

OYO Rooms, one of the top online hotel booking platforms, has successful built a highly personalised consumer experience, which has in turn driven customer acquisition, retention and revenues. 

Pranav Kumar, Head of CRM at OYO, shares how leveraging an effective CRM tool, and building a strategically structured team, proved to be a winning combination for the brand. 

Mobile-First Approach For Scale 

In a brief period, OYO grew its presence in 500 plus cities and over 10 countries. The company has over 18,000 leased and franchisee businesses across different geographies.

Handling so many properties comes with the great responsibility of filling up these rooms. This is where growth played was an important lever to fill the huge supply OYO had. 

According to Pranav, there was a huge dependence on online channels to acquire users. Conversions across the mobile app were hugely skewed if compared to the web and offline channels. So, the platform’s approach to growth was mobile-first. 

“Everything we do, we do for the app first and for every other channel later on” was the mantra. This strategy paid off, and the OYO Rooms App grew to have 5X more revenue than any other channel and 2X more conversions than any other channel. 

Choose the right CRM tool.

Pranav is a great believer that leveraging the right CRM tool is key to shape customer engagement. He draws an analogy between CRM tools and the human body; there is a brain, and there is muscle. 

The brain part of the CRM tool has to give you a lot of insights in terms of customer journeys, in terms of smart segmentation, terms analytics. For example, MoEngage has a big role to play in terms of what strategy to choose and how to go about executing campaigns. 

The muscle part has a lot to do with the execution. How easy is it to execute a campaign? What is the delivery date going to be? 

If you have to support different geographies, different vernacular languages – how can the CRM tool be leveraged to achieve these outcomes. How scalable is the tool? 

Consider all these factors when picking your CRM tool of choice. 

From Generic To Personalised Campaigns 

Once the CRM tool was set up, OYO launched its campaigns in two phases.

Phase I saw the launch of a generic campaign. With the support of a very small team, a basic process was set up. This included setting up basic segmentation processes, basic maker checker processes, and setting up the calendar for sales and campaigns.

In the second phase, OYO’s challenge was to add a personalised layer to all campaigns. The platform launched four big experiments to add a personalisation layer to the campaigns.

4 Experiments With Personalisation

Experiment 1 – City Prediction

The biggest challenge faced by OYO faced was city prediction. 

Unlike a cab-hailing service, which can track which city the consumer is based in and where he aims to travel, OYO had to predict which city the user wanted to travel to. If a user is present in Delhi, he may not be willing to book in Delhi itself. The challenge was to build a personalisation where the platform could say – “If you travel to Mumbai, this is our offer”. 

Experiment 2 – Event-based Prediction

The second level of personalisation was to accurately identify the intent of the customer. How can you find out what kind of browsing your user is doing? The efforts invested in a high intent user and a low intent user will be different. Delivering the right offer based on the predicted intent of the user is another aspect of the platform tied up. 

Experiment 3 – Recommendation model

Consumer tech platforms are constantly looking for ways to make their consumers’ lives easier. By recommending a hotel with the right city, right locality, and the right category for the user, OYO could serve this purpose. How can you recommend a hotel based on browsing patterns, something suited to their needs and category? Data indicated that once the platform began recommending hotels to the user, there was 2X revenue left in the same campaign. 

Experiment 4 – Engagement Campaign

One challenge faced by OYO, unlike other consumer tech platforms, is that the use case is not that frequent. You don’t need a hotel every day. A user may travel twice a month or once a year.

So, how can you keep OYO on top of the user’s mind? How can you engage users who come to your app daily and leverage their engagement for user conversion?

OYO then launched its flagship programme OYO Q, a simple quiz-based programme. When users open the app, they are prompted to answer some questions based on which they win some offers. The offer incentivises them to do a transaction whenever they need it.

The results for these were positive. It marked a milestone in personalisation standards and led to an increase in revenues.

Structure the team around customer lifecycles 

OYO studied booking and browsing patterns in-depth. Then they took all the data and defined a Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value (RFM) Definition model.

The RFM model took into consideration what lifecycle stage users were in and integrated these insights with the personalisation layers built into Phase II. Leveraging this information helped deliver the right product fit to the user.

The team was aligned in the same fashion. The acquisition team focuses on how to bring users to the app. The CRM team was divided into three parts based on the user lifecycle. 

First was the babycare CRM, which only focuses on the new users, starting from app installation, sign-up to the first booking.

Once done, the retention CRM comes into the picture. This team focuses on how you can ask the user on your platform to transact again and again. Can you predict where the next use case for the user is? The retention CRM feeds this kind of Intelligence into campaigns.

The churn team role identifies users based on their life cycle, use cases, and frequency of travel. How can you leverage personalisations and offers to win back churned users – this is the KPI of the churn team.

The ability to predicting the right hotel in the right city, if you are travelling solo or with a loved one, and the ability to send notifications in a local language in the international markets, is the kind of personalisation that defines the scalability of a CRM.

Prioritise The Users Needs 

Whenever OYO added a layer of personalisation to a campaign, the data indicates that conversion and traffic doubled. Understanding the users and their preferences is what has helped the company build scale and depth into its offering and become a household name among Indian travellers.