Creating multi-touch journeys that drive customer engagement

Disparate data systems prevented a clear view of the customer

Thousands of hospitality companies rely on the Mews platform to make their businesses run better. Mews strives to educate and upsell them on the Mews platform. To that end, Mews collects and analyzes vast amounts of platform usage data.

Because Mews offers a wide range of products and services, the company collected and stored data across many different data sources, which resulted in different versions of the truth. It was challenging for decision-makers to understand product usage and its impact on the business. Mews also couldn’t segment their audiences for personalized communication, which made it impossible to keep customers around the globe up to date on platform changes and new features.

Hoping to communicate more effectively with some of the largest hotels in the world, Mews began looking for a better way of managing data. Mews’ data team wanted to merge all their disparate data sets to create a single, unified customer record.

Open data lakehouse eliminates data silos and supports effective customer communication

Mews began their transformation by looking for a unified data platform. The company had built their entire data infrastructure within the Microsoft Azure cloud, so it was critical to find solutions that integrated with Azure. Mews’ data team evaluated several leading data platforms before deciding that the open data lakehouse in Azure Databricks would best support their use cases.

“We were looking for a solution that would allow us to scale how we process data and also enable future use cases,” said Vojta Kopal, Director of Engineering, Data Science, at Mews. “Azure Databricks gives us the flexibility to manipulate our data using the development language that is most suited for the job.”

After implementing Databricks, Mews’ data team soon realized that the company’s product and marketing teams would need access to customer usage data in their Intercom customer service platform to produce personalized communication. The data team had been relying on custom scripts to manage data flows out of Databricks. To automate this manual process, they turned to Hightouch.

Using Hightouch to sync data from Databricks to Intercom enables the marketing and product teams to create granular audiences and segmentations without having to switch between tools or upload CSV files. With Hightouch, the data team can automate and schedule every data sync into Intercom, allowing them to focus on more important tasks — all while keeping Intercom up to date with fresh, curated customer data.

“Hightouch allows us to leverage our existing data models so we can take action on our data immediately,” Kopal explained. “We don’t have to worry about where the data comes from or how it’s modeled because Hightouch takes care of everything.”

Mews uses Intercom for every customer-facing use case. The platform acts as the company’s CRM — a hub for accessing and leveraging customer data. These capabilities enable the marketing and product teams to power many personalization use cases. Within Intercom, the marketing team builds multi-touch journeys to educate, upsell and convert existing customers to try out new features. These communication flows are defined within Intercom, and they’re tailored to any attributes the marketing team defines.

During its frequent product updates, Mews uses Intercom to keep customers up to date on how new features work and what regulatory compliance implications the changes may have. Using granular segmentation, Mews’ product team pushes product updates to customers. They also escalate action items that help customers understand how specific legal or taxation updates will impact their region. Partners in the Mews marketplace use the same functionality to update their products and services.

“Intercom enables us to communicate dynamically with customers and partners so they can stay up to date with product features or compliance changes where they need to take action immediately,” Kopal remarked.

Unified customer view drives personalization and engagement

Since implementing Databricks, Mews’ data team has created a 360-degree view of the customer and built many new data models. These models power Hightouch syncs and touchpoints through Intercom as Mews works to keep their customers around the world informed about the latest developments on the Mews platform. Meanwhile, the data team is free from the burden of moving data, thanks to Hightouch.

“Previously, we had built a homegrown pipeline that took days to sync data to Intercom,” Kopal recalled. “Using Hightouch, I was able to sync that same data in minutes. Our data team doesn’t have to spend time debugging their code anymore because Hightouch has a built-in debugger and version control.”

By deploying customer journeys with Intercom, Mews has increased personalization across their marketing communications — and is driving greater customer engagement with every campaign. Mews’ marketing team has achieved 50% open rates and 4% click-through rates on specific email campaigns.

“We can granularly target thousands of customers and surface specific information to specific users based on their historical data and their behavioral data,” said Bethany Goetcherian, Customer Marketing Manager at Mews. “Doing this, we’ve been able to convert more leads and generate more revenue.”