Boxever

76% Of Customers Will Pay More Than 5% If They Receive A Superior Experience

elizabeth.kenny — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 08:18:44 +0000

ICMI research, summarised by Jim Tierney, Loyalty 360 has identified that a whooping 76% of the people surveyed said that they would be willing to pay an additional 5% more with superier customer experience, of which 10% of customers would pay +25%.

ICMI research found that the contact center – a company’s critical customer relationship area – is even more valuable than previously thought. Increased resources in contact centers can help build brand loyalty and have a positive impact on revenue.

Consider the U.K., for example. According to recent research from NewVoiceMedia, half of consumers in the U.K. take their business elsewhere due to inadequate service, and of that figure, 92% have switched companies at least once or twice in the past year.

Nearly 50% of survey respondents are intimidated at the thought of calling a company, fearing they’d be kept on hold or placed in a waiting queue. What’s more, 27% would tell friends about their poor customer experiences, and 19% said they’d post negative company reviews online.

These figures highlight the importance of knowing your customers and providing a real-time personalised service to them.

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Train yourself to see the world through your customer’s eyes

elizabeth.kenny — Wed, 01 May 2013 09:50:11 +0000

Paul J. H. Schoemaker has written a great article in the Inc. looking at ways to know what your customers want before they do.

The number one worry we hear from our clients today is this: “I need to understand my customer better, but it’s getting harder, not easier.”
http://www.boxever.com/train-yourself-to-see-the-world-through-your-customers-eyes/

Customers are less loyal than they used to be.

Consumers have more power than ever before, thanks to social media, easy on-line comparison-shopping, and a proliferation of choices.

Customer diversity continues to increase, putting a premium on micro-segmentation and deep customer insight.

By increasing the noise-to-data ratio, the data deluge by the Internet can actually make it harder to understand your customers.

Economic uncertainty and data overload confuse customers as well, making them less interested in products than in flexible, adaptive solutions.

To get close to this more demanding client, you really need to get inside your customers head. Here are a few good starting points;

Stand in your customer’s shoes. Look beyond your core business and understand your customer’s full range of choices, as well as his or her ecosystem of suppliers, partners etc.–of which you may be part. This exercise will also deepen your understanding of competitors and help you better anticipate their moves.

Staple yourself to a customer’s order. Track key customers’ experiences as they traverse your company’s pathways and note where the experience breaks down.

Field diverse customer teams. Add members of the back-office support group to its customer team, supplementing the usual customer-facing roles. IBM sends senior teams from different disciplines into the field to meet customers and develop a deep understanding of how to serve them better.

Learn together with customers. GE invited its top customers in China, along with local executives and account managers, to a seminar on leadership and innovation. Doing so not only helped GE executives better understand the mindset of Chinese counterparts; it also helped them to influence that mindset.

Lean forward and anticipate. Focus on what customers will want tomorrow, as Steve Jobs and Richard Branson did so exquisitely. Try to envision different futures through tools like scenario planning and then explore how underlying market shifts may affect your customers.

Remember that sometimes you need to get out of your own way to really understand your customers. Psychologists know, for example, that you’re likely to listen for problems that fit your own offerings, and to discount others. That can cause you to miss important opportunities, or to get blindsided later. So, try to listen with a third ear, as an anthropologist would, to what your customers are saying to you. If you can truly hear them, they’ll tell you all you need to know.

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Boxever UX designer creates Big Data identity for the Computer and Communications Museum

elizabeth.kenny — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 13:39:07 +0000

Darren Geraghty, Boxever’s lead UX designer, speaks about his inspiration and design methods used to create the Big Data identity for the Computer and Communications Museum of Ireland. The assignment: represent not only the museum’s mission, but also its roots;

“It’s an exciting prospect to be tasked with capturing the essence of a project through a simple mark, and also a welcome break from thinking about product-oriented problems.

The mark is composed using the binary elements of digital communication, namely 1 and 0, which are rotated to echo the form of a vintage computer,” he explained. “A Celtic triskele, or spiral, is set within the ‘screen’ to represent the Irish heritage of the museum itself.

I liken the process of designing a logo to a sculpture, in that you begin with a large block of ideas and input, then gradually pare away the unnecessary until you’re left with the essential. I’m very happy with the simplicity and meaning which the design conveys, and thankfully so was the board of the museum!”

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The Big Bang – Boxever Big Data

elizabeth.kenny — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 14:29:26 +0000

With the volume and variety of data captured by airlines having become so vast and complex, a rethink may be required on how carriers should handle it

A great article written by Martin Cowen within Airline Business

Boxever suggests airlines need to take things more slowly. “There are other data challenges which need to be solved before looking to monetise social sentiment,” he says. “We suggest that airlines identify one part or function which could be a big data opportunity, and then implement it.”

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The Big Data show – Velocity, Wednesday 24th April @ 12.30

elizabeth.kenny — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 14:30:12 +0000

Bigger Data, Better Customer conversion in travel. Say hello via @Boxever!

The Big Data Show is a must-visit annual event for every IT, marketing or digital professional, as well as senior management looking to capitalise on the boom in data volume, variety and velocity.

Our CEO, Dave, will be speaking in the Big Data Show – Velocity on Wednesday 24th April @ 12.30

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Widerøe Airlines selects Boxever for Big Data Analytics and Customer Intelligence

elizabeth.kenny — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 15:23:23 +0000

Dublin, Ireland (Mar. 05, 2013) – Widerøe Airlines, a regional airline of Scandinavian Airlines, selects Boxever for their next-generation customer intelligence platform. Boxever’s Big Data solution will give Widerøe unparalleled insight into each passenger that flies with their airline – enabling them to improve customer satisfaction and increase sales by offering customers content, products and promotions that are tailored for them.

Launched in October 2012, Boxever is cloud-based customer intelligence solution that enables airlines and travel companies to gather and analyse customer data in real- time, creating a single customer view that powers 1-1 marketing and personalisation. Widerøe joins Nordic-based Atlantic Airways, and a number of other online travel agencies and travel companies on the Boxever platform.

“Boxever are delighted to have Widerøe as customer. They are a tremendously innovative company and one of the first airlines that are truly leveraging Big Data to create unique and inspiring experiences for each of their customers.” said Dave O’Flanagan, CEO, Boxever. “We have seen a huge change in the market over the past 12 months as airlines and travel companies become more retail focused and customer-centric. We’re seeing strong market demand right across the travel vertical – not just airlines – and Boxever is well positioned to take advantage of this trend.”

Widerøe is currently ERA Airline of the Year and ranked among the top in customer service by TNS Gallop. With a distinctive brand, they won world’s best airline TV ad in 2012. They carry over 2.3M passengers both domestically and internationally.

Odd Langvatn, CEO, Widerøe Internet AS said: “Boxever’s Big Data platform has delivered tremendous value since it’s been implemented. It has enabled us to look beyond the transaction and understand who each of our passengers are. Their solution enables us to relate to each customer individually, based on everything the system has learned about them, driving conversion and increasing relevance across every customer touchpoint.

Widerøe is passionate about putting the customer at the center of everything we do and this solution is opening up exciting opportunities across our organisation.”

ENDS – For further press information/interviews Elizabeth Kenny (elizabeth@boxever.com, 00353879607111)

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The Value of Big Data in Travel

david.oflanagan — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 15:44:01 +0000

Airlines are currently struggling to come to terms with all the data they are receiving. Most airlines have some information about their loyalty customers but are unable to harness that knowledge and turn it into sales and as for the other customers, most airlines are unable to decipher the data to give them information on their behaviours at all.

Most senior managers see the benefits of using Big Data but need to justify the cost of disseminating the big data into something that the airline can use. Top management want to know what the Return on Investment (ROI). You can term ROI in many ways, whether, in terms of payback period (breakeven point), Net Present Value (NPV) or Internal Rate of Return (IRR), but with big data, it is important to look at both tangible and intangible benefits. Tangible benefits are benefits that we can put a number against and intangible are benefits whose metrics can be illusive but can significantly contribute to an organisation’s (an airline’s) competitive advantage, such as customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Big data analytics is the process of examining large amounts of data of a variety of types to uncover hidden patterns, unknown correlations and other useful information. All airlines receive large amounts of data every minute through their online channels but also have considerable amounts from their offline channels. This data, if brought into a structured format and combined into one database, can give airlines insights into their customers’ needs and desires and allow the airline to target them with more specific products – during the booking flow, post booking and even in the event of a non-booking.

However, Big Data can allow an airline to do more than just upsell or cross sell. Big Data means that an airline can give each customer an individual experience and with that experience, the airline strengthens that bond between their brand and their customer, increasing customer satisfaction and hence retention. Before an airline can define the criteria for ROI on a big data project, it needs to clearly define the objectives of the big data project and once these have been clarified to define the deliverables so that when reviewing the ROI, the chosen solution has met the business requirements and hence the ROI is a true representation of the success of the project.

Imagine having the knowledge of the individual interests of all customers, creating that individual shop front. Using the correct tools to extract that information from all the data that airlines receive constantly can give airlines unimaginable insights into the behaviours of their customers, unfortunately few airlines know how to do this. This is where Boxever comes in!

One of the uses of big “customer” data is about increasing conversion either because a customer has been offered a correct product at the correct time or because of the interaction with the airline has been an excellent experience and hence they purchase again or more products/services because of that experience.

The benefits (amongst others) of using a service for Big Data such as Boxever:

Quality Data
Increased customer insights
Better use of marketing budgets
Higher retention
Higher conversion & revenue

Imagine being able to give your customers a really individual experience as if your site and offers were made especially designed for that particular customer. Envisage being able to know that certain customers have no interest in insurance but want a city trip when they fly to a city. No need to imagine with Boxever, an airline can deliver a personalised experience to every customer.

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Winners from the National Digital Research Centre’s LaunchPad

elizabeth.kenny — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 09:22:44 +0000

Fourteen digital start-ups have been chosen for an intensive accelerator programme this week at the National Digital Research Centre’s LaunchPad, the hub which launched companies such as LogEntries and Boxever.

The participants of LaunchPad VII will each receive up to €20,000 in pre-seed investment during the 12-week programme, as well as hands-on mentoring and support from some seasoned practitioners.

The chosen start-ups include StockStream, a provider of information for the financial and investment community; Notes.ie, which provides a comprehensive and immersive educational website for students; and SchoolPay, which takes the paper money out of schools.

Read more at http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2013/0228/1224330604147.html

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ITB Berlin, 6 – 10 March 2013

elizabeth.kenny — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 14:04:54 +0000

The Worlds Leading Travel Show Say hello via @Boxever!

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The Five Minute Interview – Boxever

elizabeth.kenny — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 17:28:01 +0000

This article is one in a series of quick-hit interviews with companies using Apache Cassandra and/or DataStax Enterprise for key parts of their business. For this interview, we spoke with Alan Giles who is CTO at Boxever.

DataStax: Alan, good to talk to you today. Can you give us an overview of what Boxever is all about?

Alan: Boxever is a Big Data analytics platform for the airline industry. Focused primarily on customer data – we enable airlines to capture data shopping and purchase behavior from every channel and combine that with external data such as information from social, user generated content and data from competitive websites to deliver a single customer view for every single traveller in the airline that is used to power our analytics, 1-1 marketing and personalized merchandising – all in real-time.

Myself and my fellow co-founders, Dave and Dermot, worked together at a travel technology company here in Dublin where we built and delivered multi-million-dollar e-commerce solutions to some of the largest airlines in the world. What we saw was that relatively few had good analytics and insight – particularly in the online channel. We felt that the airlines really were a long way behind other online retail verticals. We started Boxever to fix this problem.

We launched in Q4 2012 when we announced our seed round of $1M from leading Irish investors. We are live with a number of European carriers.

We’re a SaaS provider designed specifically for the travel industry, which means there are no long, expensive hardware and software procurement cycles, no consultants and no customization – just a monthly fee. Initial integration with an airline takes less than 4 weeks, so they get a great out-of-the-box experience with us.

DataStax: Is your platform deployed on premise or in the cloud?

Alan: We’re on Amazon EC2 and are spread across three different availability zones.

DataStax: What brought you to Cassandra and DataStax Enterprise?

Alan: We originally started with MySQL as the backend database, but we quickly found that MySQL just won’t scale for the things we need to do. So we’ve now made the total transition to DataStax Enterprise.

We take in so much data that we need something that can scale with the intensity of the data velocity we experience. For example, we consume all data relating to a user’s browsing behavior on airline sites. This includes all the various flight combinations that are suggested to a particular user along with what combination they eventually settled on. We report back to the airlines things like which of their offers and flight combinations are the best performing. That data alone can be massive to consume and analyze.

We’re using Cassandra to pull in all this data and more, and then we’re providing real-time analytics back to our airline customers about the things that matter to their business.

DataStax: What are some examples of the real-time analytics you crunch through?

Alan: We do everything from determining what a particular user’s intent is, comparing that user against all other customers of an airline’s website in regard to behavior, their likes and dislikes, and producing analysis for an airline’s recommendation engine for what types of offers each user should be receiving at a particular time.

DataStax: Any other particular technical aspects that caused you to go down the NoSQL route?

Alan: Our data model absolutely must be flexible, so this was another driver for us to go with something other than a traditional RDBMS.

DataStax: Did you try other NoSQL products before settling on DataStax Enterprise?

Alan: Yes, we did evaluate other NoSQL options and looked especially hard at MongoDB. However, during our evaluation Cassandra demonstrated more positives such as better write latency, no single point of failure, and linear scalability.

DataStax: Why did you go with DataStax Enterprise over just the community version of Apache Cassandra?

Alan: The big decider for us was the integrated Hadoop and Solr functionality.

DataStax: Alan, sounds like you guys are doing some pretty interesting things – thanks for the time.

Alan: Sure.

To find out more about Boxever, visit www.boxever.com.

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