Personalizing RCI's Member Experience
Project Spotlight: a member site that changes with each visitor, managed by a team of eight across 20 vacation clubs and 15 languages.
One Site, Shaped Around Each Member
RCI, part of Wyndham Destination Network, runs a membership-based vacation exchange. Its website was misaligned with what members were looking for, launching a new site or promotion took too long, and almost every change depended on IT.
We implemented OpenText TeamSite and LiveSite to re-envision the member experience. Each page decides what to show from who the member is: their membership tier, locale, account and where they are in planning a vacation. Marketing manages that content itself, including inside the transactional pages IT owns.
Over about 18 months, RCI launched an entirely new web presence: 90 sites and more than 18,000 pages in 15 languages, built from more than 40 reusable components. Along the way, 500 articles from RCI's Endless Vacation magazine were brought onto every locale.
At a Glance
16 Member Attributes
Seven components, from navigation and menus to offers, carousels and articles, target content on 16 core attributes such as membership tier and locale, plus extended attributes kept in RCI's marketing data warehouse.
Help When It's Needed
When a member's attributes show they may need support, the site shows chat, FAQs and other support tools.
Live Account Data
Components show each member's balances, held reservations and resort recommendations through RCI's web services layer.
Inside IT's Pages
LiveSite components run inside the transactional JSP pages IT owns, so marketing can target members there too.
White-Label Club Sites
20 of RCI's 90 sites are co-branded or white-label sites for its affiliate vacation clubs, a new line of business. Affiliate requests are now answered in minutes.
Authors Trained
We trained the eight people on the marketing and ecommerce team, who now publish 100 to 200 pieces of content a week.
What the Site Knew About Each Member
Every targeted component decided what to show from the member's profile. These are some of the attributes it read.
Membership
- Membership tier
- Product type
- Membership expiration
Location and Language
- Country of residence
- Locale and language
Account and Planning
- Deposit eligibility
- Stage in planning a vacation
Example: The RCI Platinum Overlay
One component shows how the targeting worked. An overlay invites a member to upgrade to RCI Platinum, but only if they are eligible, and its message changes with their history: a member who has never been Platinum, one whose Platinum membership has lapsed, and a new Platinum member each see different content.
The member's ID, eligibility and tier status are passed into the content, so the overlay can greet them by name. Every field in it, from the image to the call-to-action button, is authored in TeamSite. The overlay remembers when a member closes it, so it doesn't keep interrupting them.
What RCI Said
"We met with a few different firms and could see that Klish Group had the expertise and enthusiasm needed to make our project a success."
Quoted in OpenText's customer case study, RCI raises web channel's share of transaction revenue with OpenText TeamSite and LiveSite.