OYO Transforms Its Customer Engagement Strategy

OYO Hotels and Homes started as a young hotel startup in 2013 and is now the world’s leading chain of homes and hotels. But with operations in 800 cities across 80 countries, OYO’s priorities have increasingly shifted towards being able to deliver a superior, seamless experience to its users.

The challenge of a seamless customer experience

OYO decided to personalize its user experience, using advanced segmentation and customization techniques to send hotel recommendations and price offers via channels like emails, SMS, and push notifications.

However, like most companies that operate in emerging economies, OYO faced a major hurdle. The delivery rate of their push notifications was abysmally low, especially on Chinese OEMs like MI devices. Given that 17-20% of OYO users have Xiaomi devices; this was really bad news because overall delivery for active users was now less than 30%.

This meant that OYO had a two-step challenge. For starters, they needed to increase the delivery rate of push notifications so that they could build user retention while scaling up quickly. And then they had to find ways of delivering a more personalized user experience through relevant recommendations. 

Driving personalization at scale

OYO decided to partner with MoEngage, a comprehensive customer engagement platform, to tackle this issue on both fronts.

With MoEngage’s Push Amplification, OYO was able to improve its delivery rate by 44% for Xiaomi devices. The platform offers a unique fallback mechanism to deliver notifications at a later time in case the FCM fails. Using this feature, the brand was able to deliver its push notifications to users who owned a Xiaomi or any other Chinese smartphone. This meant that they increased their overall campaign notification delivery by a whopping 25%. Not only were they able to reach more users, but sending the right push notifications also helped in converting more users in the long run.

Once the delivery was sorted, OYO decided to focus on personalized user experience.

Using MoEngage’s Dynamic Product Messaging (DPM), the brand used the search and booking history of both active and dormant users to build the right messaging. Using personalized notifications eventually led to a 2X increase in CTRs (Click Through Rates).

Arjya Nathvani, AVP-CRM, OYO, said, “MoEngage has played a pivotal role in realizing our communication strategy. It stitches together all channels seamlessly and complements them with features like Dynamic Product Messaging, Advanced Analytics, Intelligent Delay Optimization, and Push Amplification. That has really helped us serve the right message to the right people at the right time, at scale.”