About this Project
Client's Business Challenge
This multi-billion dollar, global hotel brand was undergoing a digital transformation focused on growing revenue while making it easier for customers to do business with them online, on any device. The company sought to launch a globalization effort to achieve 3 things: 1) enable its English-only eCommerce site — responsible for booking over 100million room-nights annually — to deliver seamless in-language experiences across its Search, Booking, and Reservation Management workflows; 2) decentralize and scale its content governance model — empowering their regional marketing teams to deploy relevant content/promotions/experiences for their local audiences; and 3) establish a reusable framework for “globalizing” additional websites such as their Customer Loyalty site that served over 50 million customers.
Our Approach
We began by conducting a thorough globalization-readiness assessment to understand the client’s readiness to undertake this initiative from several perspectives including: content status & location, internal technology dependencies, external partner technology dependencies (e.g. cloud services, CDN, hosting), content translation/governance models, domestic/international employee awareness, and domestic/international franchise hotel partner awareness. We uncovered multiple opportunities to clarify team structures, streamline governance/workflows, increase stakeholder visibility/coordination, and resolve lingering technical debt. We collaborated with the client to structure and drive this transformation program which spanned many areas including: organizational design, content governance, modernizing the client’s technology stack to manage the content translation and enable the new content governance model, synchronizing the efforts of internal & external technology teams, and change management & training to enable their team to structure and execute future globalization efforts for their other web properties.
Value Delivered
We successfully completed this globalization effort, enabling seamless in-language experiences in 10 languages across their critical Search, Booking, and Reservation Management workflows for their customers in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Further, the new decentralized content governance model enabled their regional marketing teams to deploy more personalized, in-market content/promotions/experiences, sparking increased engagement, bookings, and booking velocity. Additionally, the client was able to manage future language translations for this eCommerce site on their own, using the playbook, workflows, and tools we developed in the initial globalization phase.
Client
Global Hotel Brand
Engagement
eCommerce Globalization
Skills
What Our Clients Say
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Erickson Immigration Group
Erin Gerald has been invaluable to my company. Beyond their Digital Expertise, I found them to be incredibly insightful & resourceful business people who have clearly 'been there, done that' when it comes to launching and commercializing digital products. I'm so excited to partner with them on HealthyBites!
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Junior Achievement of Delaware
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