Digital due diligence for investment

A global investment firm approached us to undertake a digital due diligence to assess the opportunity for a potential acquisition of a Hotel Group.

The goals were to identify any specific areas ready for improvement that will  enhance the digital customer experience, create real business value, and generate additional revenues.  The requirement for the project to take max 2 weeks (i.e. 10 working days).

Approach:

• Audit, review and document business and user requirements.
• Digital experience benchmarking/best in class analysis.
• Research, plan and document user personas, journeys and scenarios.
• Wireframes – visually communicate where and how improvements can be made to improve the customer’s digital experience.
• Design language exploration – visual identity in the digital space
• Documenting and presentation of findings and recommendations.

Output:

• Report findings and prominent recommendations.
• High level digital customer experience design solutions, CRM exploration and recommendations.
• Quantification of potential benefits as a result of recommended improvements.
• Associated timings and costs for production of recommendations.

Result:

• Within two weeks we produced a digital due diligence report, revealing several key findings to inform the potential investment.
• Only 26% of all room bookings were actually completed direct/online.
• We identified the current digital customer experience across all websites and mobile applications was extremely poor. Digital products and services were slow, confusing and frustrating for customers to use.
• We identified a program of work to create a new Target Operating Model that would significantly improve the customer experience and dramatically increase revenues for the company.
• By adopting the new TOM we believed an increase of direct online room booking revenues x4.5 would be possible – shifting approx annual revenues of 203m euros to 765m euros over three years.
• Recommendation to move to an online only booking framework and by doing this realising the potential for direct online room booking revenues to increase to 922m euros
• Adopting the TOM and migration of customers from phone bookings, could generate extra revenues during the booking process to generate in total 1.18bn euros.