Applying a Customer-Centric Approach To Boost Revenue
The travel consumers’ behavior is constantly evolving and Rocket Travel by Agoda knows how important it is to continue evolving along with them when it comes to our proprietary technologies. In an effort to appeal to our customers' experience, we found a way to make it more accessible and efficient for users to find rental cars that meet their needs. In doing so, we increased our conversion rate by 2% on desktop devices and increased conversions from the search results page to the payment page on the mobile experience.
Filters: Making the search experience easy
WINNER
Maure L.
As a tech company, we continuously monitor our platforms to ensure travelers have the optimal booking experience while interacting with our sites. Over the years, so much of what we have learned about our customers' needs, behaviors, and priorities when booking travel came from our curiosity to ask "why?" Through constant testing and experimentation, we have been able to build travel booking platforms that offer a seamless and valuable experience.
Based on the interaction data and the user feedback we collected, we knew that there was an opportunity to make it easier for customers to find the rental vehicle that best fits their needs. While search filters were available, we learned customers had difficulties utilizing them during their booking process.
Upon collecting this insight, we collaborated with our talented design team to bring our cars quick filters experiment to life. By leveraging the expertise of our creative designers, our engineers implemented a new UI (user interface) experience by surfacing it right above the page after a user searches on our site.
The quick filters functionality available on our cars' platform demonstrates how our technology is continuously evolving. These filters offer customers a succinct and interactive view of the various vehicle types offered in a given location. They allow travelers to narrow their search and choose from compact cars to vans to luxury vehicles, empowering them to take a proactive approach when looking for a car rental.
Collecting data to inform our decisions
To validate our hypothesis that the quick filters enhancement would improve the usability of our sites, we conducted an A/B test on our platforms, similar to our Hotel Platform team, who was able to boost hotel conversion through experimentation. During 3 months, 50% of our travelers reserved their rentals by interacting with the quick filters, while the other half continued to use our legacy filters variant.
The quick filters A/B test generated a 2% increase in revenue. More importantly, the data we collected was essential to continue guiding our design efforts to further ease the travel bookings experience from a mobile device perspective.
Keeping the partners at the forefront of our minds
Today, the quick filters are available on four partner white-label websites: T-Mobile, Virgin Australia, American Airlines, and Lifemiles. Considering our global partners and their different business objectives, we developed the quick filters to be flexible so that the clickable filter card could also highlight other information, depending on the partner's goals. For example, when running a promotion, we may offer the option to filter results based on offer eligibility. We can also customize this technology per partner and leverage any existing relationship they may have with a particular rental agency.
The experience of running such experimentation on our cars' platform was crucial to the evolution of our technology. As we continue to uncover opportunities to evolve, we are eager to experiment further by supporting our partners and their objectives while maintaining a customer-centric mindset across all steps of the travelers’ journey.
About the author
Rocket Travel by Agoda, part of Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG), is a leader in the travel industry offering technology and marketing solutions for some of the largest consumer brands in the world.
