How Priceline democratized its data to power more personalized customer experiences

When it comes to providing great customer experiences, data silos are one of the biggest challenges holding teams back. 

Channel teams commonly rely on their own data because of technology limitations (lifecycle teams see email data, digital marketing teams see paid advertising data, etc.). That means no team has a complete view of individual customers — making it impossible to approach them with the right message in the best place when it matters. 

The marketing and data team at Priceline, a global leader in online travel, experienced these hurdles firsthand and realized its technology was hampering their ability to engage customers effectively. To overcome this, they modernized the infrastructure and designed a strategy to democratize data and unlock continuous campaign improvement. 

Mahesh Baral, senior director of engineering at Priceline, and Yasmeen Ahmad, managing director of data, analytics, and AI product at Google, detailed this journey at GrowthLoop Live. They shared the following tips and insights to help organizations in a similar situation break down silos and futureproof their data strategy. 

Data silos inhibit marketing innovation

Priceline is fueled by its mission to be the best travel dealmakers in the world and connect customers with the best travel options and deals possible. Its team knew they needed to democratize data across marketing teams and channels to fulfill this mission — but data pipeline silos were in their way. 

• Data and workflows were segmented across teams, including email, paid advertising, and website personalization.

• Multiple data pipelines required intricate batch processing for marketers to build audiences and access customer insights.

• Resources were wasted as teams waited for data and had to repeat steps each time to build and execute campaigns.

It’s a common situation teams face. Regardless of industry, organizations often have individual data, audience, and workflow layers that lead to team silos. 

These boundaries inhibit a holistic view of the customer journey and stop teams from accurately measuring the impact of their efforts (which is essential to continually refine their approach and know which channels matter most). 

These data struggles were all too real for the Priceline team.

“As we got into products and services and different marketing channels, we got into this setup of creating silos. And silos naturally give rise to siloed data pipelines,” Mahesh explained. “[That] was a key challenge for us in terms of meeting our goal of democratization of our data.”

Three steps to power personalized customer experiences

Priceline saw the opportunity to reset its data foundation while preserving its existing channel tool investments. The new setup empowers marketers with the insights they need to exceed their customer expectations and use AI to greatly improve their work. 

It took these three steps:

1: Centralize all customer data for a single source of truth

Data silos were the first issue to address. All customer data needs to live in a central place for teams to store, combine, and analyze it. This also enables a customer 360 view representing insights from every marketing and sales channel, which is essential for delivering personalized experiences. 

A cloud-based enterprise data warehouse is the optimal data foundation, because it can connect to any channel tool, offer robust security features, and enable real-time data processing. 

Priceline selected Google BigQuery as its data warehouse, which is designed to collect data in various formats (also called multimodal data). 

“A recent study showed a 30% improvement in customer experience from being able to see a true customer 360 through multimodal data,” Yasmeen said. “We historically spoke about bringing all company data together, but we still largely just relied on the structured data — and just 10% of data in a business is structured. Actually being able to capture that 90% of enterprise data that is not structured is more possible today than ever before.”

BigQuery can combine structured and unstructured data, spanning customer transactions, PDFs, voice, and more. This complete dataset allows teams to drive a richer customer experience and more accurate segmentation. It also futureproofs the data strategy, because the team can scale its storage with ease and continue to collect and merge any data type, allowing Priceline to leverage all its data and integrate insights across any channel.

2: Democratize customer data to build intelligent audiences

With all data stored in BigQuery, Priceline was ready to implement a composable customer data platform (CDP) to make it easy for marketers to view customer profiles and create audiences for their campaigns. 

“How are you going to run a million different customer journeys that are all unique? That's only possible if you can bring together the world of the marketeer and this business-user-friendly interface directly with the data within the data cloud,” Yasmeen said.

Priceline chose GrowthLoop as its composable CDP built on BigQuery, giving every team that leverages customer data the ability to create audiences and activate them across their marketing channels. GrowthLoop makes it easy to analyze customer data and suggest audiences for campaigns including: 

• Customer acquisition - Learn which prospects have yet to convert and build a customer acquisition strategy to entice them to buy.

• Cross-selling - Create a customer segment that is likely to purchase complementary products based on their purchase history. 

• Churn winback - Identify customers who are no longer engaging with brand outreach and craft a tailored winback campaign to reengage them. 

GrowthLoop plugs directly into BigQuery, meaning there is no step to load data, so marketers can build audiences with real-time, accurate, and inclusive information. All data is continuously fed back into BigQuery so it is integrated and activated seamlessly.

3: Enable marketers to self-serve data for ongoing campaign optimization

In addition to accessing customer data and creating audiences, GrowthLoop enables Priceline’s channel teams to create campaigns and activate that data in their preferred tools. 

Harmonizing the data leads to effective cross-channel targeting with performance metrics available for continual campaign optimization. 

Mahesh reinforced the importance of accessing performance data: “We can only do a good job with our campaign if we're able to measure it. The problem with [our old infrastructure] is since we had specific silos for each channel, the measurement processes were also very catered towards those silos.”

Priceline’s team can access at-a-glance KPIs or dig deeper into metrics to assess which strategies are working, where they can improve efforts, and what opportunities they can leverage to exceed customer expectations. 

Yasmeen applauded GrowthLoops’s ability to enable truly intuitive customer journeys. “What GrowthLoop is doing with customer journeys, this is the future.”

Keeping humans in the loop with generative AI

This new infrastructure preserves Priceline’s investments in its channel tools (including Iterable and Google Ad Manager) and provides its team with a highly intuitive interface to orchestrate campaigns.

The team can also unlock the full power of generative AI, because AI can work from complete and accurate customer data inclusive of cross-channel activities. Combining insights from every channel in real-time off a single source of truth — rather than from individual data silos — ensures AI can fulfill its greatest potential: 

• Serving as a creative partner that greatly accelerates speed, efficiency, and performance.

• Handling repetitive tasks so marketers can focus on creative ideation and optimization.

• Proactively flagging considerations for marketers to review, ensuring humans are always in control. 

This setup fulfills the promise of closed-loop marketing because the team now has integrated data that can showcase the actual business results of their efforts. This enables an ongoing cycle of innovation — something we call a unified loop — and keeps Priceline ahead of its evolving customer needs. 

Breaking down silos for better marketing

It’s vital for teams to lay the appropriate foundation today to scale their marketing success and stay ahead of increasingly complex customer journeys. Organizations that can make informed decisions based on complete customer data are improving their experiences at incredible rates, and those who fall behind may lose their chance to catch up. 

Priceline embraced this opportunity, ensuring customers around the world can continue to access the best travel deals and experience the moments that matter.