• by Steve Smith  @popeyesm, October 1, 2024

In this edition of Quick Questions, Marc Sheinkin, Senior Director, Member and Guest Communications at Marriott answers questions about Marriott’s channel expansion, using third-party apps to meet customers where they are, and potentials/downfalls of AI. 

1. We have been talking about the transition from email to SMS for eons now. What are you seeing in terms of customer preference?

During a stay, SMS is a better guest communication channel than email. We use SMS for things like room-ready alerts and service requests, and it is highly effective in cases when the guest is expecting a real-time response. Between stays, we’re still finding email to be the preferred option for driving guest engagement and keeping Marriott top-of-mind. Email has much larger reach and better delivery economics than SMS. We can also bring more content into an email with multiple modules than a 160-character text message.

The other piece to this puzzle is push notifications to our mobile app. The beauty of push is that it drives guests directly to the Marriott Bonvoy app, where they can book (or make other transactions) seamlessly. Operational/delivery costs for push are much lower, as is consent management, since it’s controlled by the user in their app.

So, for Marriott this is less a “transition from email to SMS” and more a channel expansion, bringing push and SMS alongside email in an orchestrated way, using all three channels in the most cost-effective and guest-focused way possible.

2. What roles do third party apps now play in the communication mix to customers?

Third-party apps like WeChat, WhatsApp, Line and Kakao are absolutely part of our communication strategy – they have to be! For example, we’ve started supporting limited customer-service interactions in WhatsApp, where we can conduct two-way conversations with a live agent (not a bot). A natural outgrowth of this is to use WhatsApp for marketing, and we see this as similar to how we might use other social channels for marketing.

Our concern is staying ahead of the curve and moving seamlessly to the next app that hasn’t been invented or widely adopted yet. The martech and operations we put in place for today’s third-party communications apps must be easily adapted for whatever comes next – otherwise we’ll always be playing catch-up.

3. What have you learned so far about the limitations of using AI in email creation/segmentation?

We see a lot of potential in using AI to help Marriott highlight our brands and products to a worldwide audience. Today we’re responsible for marketing more than 30 brands in more than 20 languages – and both those numbers are likely to grow. Operating at our pace and scale requires tools that let marketers do marketing, while automating tasks that shouldn’t require human intervention. AI can be used to subtly differentiate copy by hotel brand or manage certain translation tasks.

We also see AI playing a role in real-time message arbitration – determining which content to send to each guest in each channel at a given moment. Marketers provide the guidance and business rules, determining which business outcomes are the most profitable, and then the machine decides in real-time which message to serve up. We used to do that with a human being and a calendar, which resulted in batch-and-blast, one-size-fits-most communications. AI can help us do a lot better, allowing us to truly personalize and localize content to each recipient.

The limitation is that we can’t just plug this into a generic AI content generator and see what happens. We need more expertise in how to build AI-powered marketing functionality, and marketers who know how to program the machinery. And we need to ensure the output feels authentic to the guest, not a Frankenstein of disaggregated content. 

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