Speed-Trap Real-Time Information Allows Leading Hotel Company to Identify $3 Million Lost Opportunity

NEWBURY, England -

- Speed-Trap’s Customer Insight Technology and Real-Time Information is Used by Hilton Hotels to Analyse Performance and Customer Interaction on new Website and Improve Customer Relationship Management

Speed-Trap www.speed-trap.com/ announces that Hilton Hotels, the global hospitality company, has used real-time information gathered through Speed-Trap’s customer insight technology to identify and fix potential customer relationship management problems in the website, one of which could have led to lost revenues of 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 Speed-Trap’s software, tr.im/stTech Hilton was then able to capture real-time information on individual visitors’ interaction with the site. Using this real-time information and customer insight technology, tr.im/apindex Hilton was able 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.

Malcolm Duckett, VP Marketing & Operations at online customer insight technology provider Speed-Trap tr.im/MalcolmD comments, “Hilton’s experience of using Speed-Trap’s customer insight technology and real-time information to improve customer relationship management and understand customer experience on existing, and new sites, parallels that with many of our customers. Our ability to gather real-time information via the customer insight technology and attach specific behaviour, experiences and outcomes to individual sessions has allowed our customers to use real-time information to rapidly locate problem areas and apply their resources to address the issues which really make a difference to their bottom line and customer relationship management.”

Suniel Curtis, Online Business Analysis Manager at Hilton Hotels explains, “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 Speed-Trap’s data on the individual sessions and investigate why.”

Curtis continues, “One major issue that was 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.”

Curtis continues, “Essentially we wanted to follow all customer clicks and dig down into the performance differences of the two sites, correcting any problems. When we first saw Speed-Trap we were highly impressed by the design of the software, particularly its ability to flexibly segment reports to help us drill down to find the cause of usual results. We could adapt different fields to suit our particular needs which enabled us to understand what was happening with the website.”

Curtis continues “We ran online surveys in parallel with the Speed-Trap software which identified minor usability problems that Speed-Trap allowed us to quantify. For instance, customers were finding it hard to search for hotels and Speed-Trap could reveal this was due to customers taking multiple trips through to the results page, when ideally we would like them to go through one.”

Curtis concludes, “When you are able to monitor every single click and user journey on the web, especially when you have a large website, tagging can take a huge amount of time. So you have to choose what to tag, which means you run the risk of missing important unknowns. With Speed-Trap there is one simple line of code in each page, and our testing showed that the impact of this script is less than a half second, one-off, penalty for each user, and subsequently a few milliseconds for data transfers to Speed-Trap on each page. This saves a lot of time not only in deployment, but also means we can receive the insight in real-time, without impacting site performance.”

Speed-Trap’s unique in-page customer insight technology (which powers its range of web analytics, targeted marketing and customer relationship management solutions) delivers unprecedented detail and accuracy. This is achieved by the way it captures real-time information on the customer’s interaction at the user interface and makes this data available to allow the site owner to tailor the site to deliver the best customer experience possible.

About Speed-Trap

Speed-Trap is a provider of software that uses Web 2.0 technology to capture and analyse interaction at the user interface - whatever the device e.g. mobile, iPhone, PDA, gaming console, or technology deployed e.g. webpage, Flash, Flex, AJAX etc. - to deliver complete real-time information and data on every visitor and user of your online applications - complete online customer insight.

Speed-Trap’s systems have come to define a new approach to the integration of on-line applications into an enterprise’s Information Architecture. The system’s User Interface Capture functionality provides a definitive, flexible and reusable source of customer, behavioural, process and performance data from any internet, intranet or extranet application.

Speed-Trap’s customers use their patented and tag-free Dynamic Collection(TM) solutions to drive applications as diverse as Fraud Detection, Marketing Automation, Campaign Measurement, Usability & Design, customer relationship management systems and Web Analytics.

With an integrated, interactive reporting suite and options to directly populate Enterprise Data warehouses via its alliance with Teradata, it represents the leading edge of advanced on-line channel data capture, analysis and delivery systems. Companies like The SAS Institute utilise Speed-Trap’s technology in their SAS for Customer Experience Analytics product that couples their world-class analytics, marketing tools with Speed-Trap technology to provide integrated cross-channel marketing and customer insight.

Based in the UK, Speed-Trap delivers its solutions directly and via a range of OEM, reseller and system integration partners around the world. Direct customers include Alliance & Leicester, AXA, directgov, Betfair, Paddy Power, PC World Business, ghd and WH Smith. Speed-Trap’s partners include the SAS Institute, Teradata Corporation, Arcade e-Business, BIMA Consulting and Zencos LLC.

For further information, please contact: Malcolm Duckett Will Gardiner Speed-Trap itpr Tel: +44(0)1635-230-630 Tel: +44(0)1932-578-800 www.speed-trap.com/ www.itpr.co.uk/

Source: Speed-Trap

For further information, please contact: Malcolm Duckett, Speed-Trap, Tel: +44(0)1635-230-630; Will Gardiner, itpr, Tel: +44(0)1932-578-800