Scandic improved its market understanding by using Crowd Insights data

Scandic learned to better target its sales and marketing resources by combining Telia Crowd Insights analytics with its own customer data. This way, the company believes it will improve the occupancy at its hotels.

“We needed to understand how we could better reach potential customers and increase the capacity use in our hotels. Telia Crowd Insights seemed like an efficient way of acquiring data on the movement of people, and we decided to give it a try in the Tampere region,” says Christian Borg, Commercial Director for Finland at the Scandic Hotels group. In addition to Finland, Scandic operates in five other countries. The chain has five hotels in Tampere.

Crowd Insights analytics is based on anonymous location data from the mobile network and can be used to gather comprehensive information about people’s movements. The Tampere pilot, started in autumn 2018 by Scandic and Telia, sought answers to the following questions among others: How many guests arriving from outside of the town overnight in Tampere and what regions do they overnight at in Tampere? Where do the people come from and where do they spend their days when visiting Tampere? To find the answers, the vast amounts of data produced by the mobile networks were filtered, displaying the data essential to Scandic in the Crowd Insights user interface.

The real answers are obtained by combining data

It was soon discovered that the best results are obtained when the Crowd Insights data are combined with the information collected by Scandic on its customers. “We got a very clear picture of the unused customer potential when we combined our data to see how many people stayed outside our hotel but within their area,” Borg explains.

Responsible for the Scandic pilot, Telia Head of Sales and Business Development Petri Seppänen confirms that combining data often gives the best results. Says Seppänen, “There are vast amounts of data available, most of which is utterly useless to the customer. One must be able to filter out the essential part from the masses. Combined with other data sets, the results can be much more valuable. We help our customers both collect the data and refine it.”

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Better resource focusing

According to Borg, the Tampere Crowd Insights pilot was successfully completed with promising results. “With the customer potential identified, we can better focus marketing and sales measures in the right way, for instance. We now better understand the competitive situation in Tampere,” Borg explains.

Borg considers the customisable user interface of Crowd Insights a benefit. “The service allows us to easily display just the right data and enables us to customise the views according to our needs.” Also Mr. Seppänen from Telia considers the visual and customisable user interface an important part in the development of the Crowd Insights service. “We can provide businesses with the data but the people who best know how to use the data are the employees of our customers. This is why it is important that the data be in an understandable and usable format.”

After the successful pilot, Telia and Scandic are thinking about the further use of the Crowd Insights service. “Our business would certainly benefit from analytics scaled to the whole country,” concludes Borg.

The challenge
Scandic wanted to better understand its customer potential so that sales and marketing resources could be focused in a more sensible way and to improve the occupancy of hotels.

The solution
The Telia Crowd Insights service was piloted in Tampere. The mobile network data on the movement of people were combined with Scandic’s own customer data.

The benefits
Scandic gained an accurate image of its customer potential in Tampere and could better focus its resources. 

Text: Satu Ekman