#5 Timothy Lange | Numa's Innovative Travel Model | CRM & Loyalty Strategies | Customer Engagement

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Hey there and welcome to Inside CRM. I'm your host, Jessica Jansen and I'm so excited to have you join us Today on this podcast. We dive into the world of CRM with experts from all kinds of companies, from fresh faced startups to billion dollar unicorns and solid established corporations. Our goal, to share practical insights and strategies that you can actually use. Each episode is a quick 20 minute chat packed with tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your CRM. So grab a cup of coffee, get comfy and let's get started.

We have Timothy here. It's great to have you.

Thank you.

So he hasn't been to the meetup yet. He is really like a guinea pig, just full in trying it out, which is great. Please introduce yourself to everyone.

Sure. Yeah. My name is Tim. It says Timothy there. Please. Tim. I have the most German name in the world, but I'm actually from Canada and I've been in CRM for about 15 years now. And I've jumped between every industry you can imagine. So I've done restaurant, I've done movies. I met Tom Cruise and Ryan Gosling. That was fun. Oil and gas.

Explain that later.

Yeah, it was crazy media. And I actually moved to Berlin six years ago, actually got my start at Blinkist and I've moved around the startup scene since. Currently I'm at a company called numa, which I'd be surprised if anyone in the audience actually knew existed. Oh, that's pretty good. That's way more than we normally get, actually. Kudos. Yeah. So I can briefly maybe explain what NUMA is.

Yeah, because also it's a quite special business model that people might to get to know to also understand what you're doing there.

It's a kind of a new business model, but we're not that unique and it's, I think, one you're going to start seeing more of. So the way we describe it is a mixture of Airbnb and kind of hotels. So I think if you think of traditional structure of hotels, it's a stuffy process of. It's very antiquated in terms of you come to the lobby, get a key card, you check in and you also purchase a lot of services by also booking a hotel. So maybe you also inherently pay for the fact that you're going to have cleaning every day, that they have a restaurant in the building, that there's a spa service. All of these things, whether or not you know it, are bundled into that cost. But on the other side of things, you Have Airbnb, which for some experiences can be great. You could come to a villa in Italy overlooking the seaside and you're like, this is fantastic. I love this. You get that unique kind of experience of kind of having that local stay. Other times you might be in the bedroom beside a guy who plays metal music all night and you're like, I fucking hate my life. Get me out of here. And so what we've tried to do is try to combine those two elements together and try to look at what a kind of new form of hospitality would be. So we call ourselves serviced apart hotels, which really tells you nothing. But at the end of the day, what we really are is we can be anywhere in a city, whether we have a floor, whether we have four units, whether we have an entire building. And it's a very simple contactless check in, checkout. And we strip away all the amenities. You don't need.

So.

So you don't need probably a restaurant in the building. You're probably not going to eat there. If you're coming to a city, you probably want to go try something local. You're probably not going to go to the spa. All these services you don't want, we strip that away. So really what we give you is a room that's easy to check in and easy to check out. We don't bother you with the extra cleaning costs, we don't come every single day. And we can always dependently tell you, besides maybe a few locations that we're by some of the kind of marquee locations in the city that you would actually want to experience.

Interesting. And when we had our talk before, you mentioned that content is really key for you and you are passionate about that, especially with this kind of industry and business model. Could you elaborate what you doing with your content? Because you're also responsible as head of content. CM loyalty. You're taking it off.

I like to collect titles. Yeah. Our head of content quit a year ago and they're like, do you want to do it? I said, sure, why not? And I think inherently it makes sense that content and travel really go well together. Right. Because also when you think of a business like ours, you're really. Especially when you're doing something like CRM or any kind of marketing, you're not really talking to that audience and saying like, oh, our room, we've got really good thread count on our sheets, or the aromas of our bath soaps, fantastic. You should come to Berlin. That's not the way you sell a business like ours. Really? What we do from a CRM perspective and from a content perspective is we're trying to elicit those emotions you feel when you want to go on a trip somewhere. So we want to talk about what's it feel like to go sit on the beach in Barcelona and party on the beach until six o' clock in the morning or go to Italy and eat some really good pasta. Content and CRM and any kind of marketing are inherently linked there because really what we're trying to sell to our guests, we use guests very deliberately, we don't use customers, is this idea of you should co experience, travel, go on that trip, treat yourself by the way, while you're there, maybe consider NUMA if you figured out what the fuck NUMA is yet. And so that's really the relationship we've established and why content's really important to what we do is because without that kind of emotional connection, we don't get people to purchase because it's not instinctual. How it is with, you know, you get an email From Zalando, something's 50% off, you're like, oh yeah, I could buy that, maybe return it later. Same with like Volt. And maybe you want to order some food. I know I'm calling you out and being like, oh yeah, it's okay. We're featuring McDonald's this week. McDonald's great food, you should order it. This is more. Okay. We need you to make quite a hefty investment to actually go on a trip. And we're a part of that investment, but there's also other costs that we don't control. And so we really need to sell you on that experience. If we can't, then why would you actually want to go on that trip to begin with?

You're already going into bit of the differences of the industries and if you look behind, you can see there's also a question around it. How CIM differ in different industries. Which one did you like the most? What one did you like the least?

Least was really easy. Like I said, it worked for oil and gas and it's, it's, oh yeah, keep killing the planet. Folks like trying to encourage people to drive more, use more gasoline. There was no fun in that. Most. I think it probably is a tie between like my current one travel and then the movie one. So my very first job out of school was actually a movie theater chain in Canada and we are the only chain in Canada. And so we really controlled the entire industry and we got to do a lot of fun things where when I joined we had just started a loyalty program. We were connecting, collecting a lot of information on guests, and actually quite a few times went to the Warner Brothers office, the Disney office, and was talking them through, okay, the new Iron man movie is out. How do we actually figure out what the audience is for that movie and how do we promote it to those people, both from a content perspective, but also from a discounting perspective. In that case, we were using loyalty points. But that was again, another one where I think anytime you can do CRM where you can create that emotional connection. Right. Cause there's very little emotion you can elicit from someone being like, go use more gas. I guess you can say, go on a road trip. Go visit somewhere. But inherently you're just like, oh, this feels so scummy. Go travel to numa. Inherently, it feels a little scummy doing it. Maybe not to. Sorry if there's anyone oil gas in the room. But for the movies and for travel, you really get to play on, like, the. Okay, why don't you want to go see, like, a movie like this on the big screen? And so that was a lot of fun.

So. And how did you meet Ryan Gosling and who was the other one again?

Tom Cruise. So I promoted There's a movie called Edge of Tomorrow, if anyone knows it. With Tom Cruise, it's got about three different titles because none of them really stuck from a marketing perspective. So they also had Live, Die, Repeat, and Die, I think was the other one. I'm not surprised. I didn't work, but they had the premiere for that. And I was also promoting the movie. And he tends to get very involved, even on the marketing side of things because it's.

You heard that already from Disney.

Really? Yes. Yeah.

Yeah.

He gets really involved. And. Yeah, so I got to meet him because he. I went to the premiere of the movie in Canada and also helped them promote the movie. And then if anyone's seen La Land, I also did the same thing and met Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone and John Legend actually together, which was fun.

How are they?

Ryan Gosling is as standoffish as he looks. In any event, he's also a fellow Canadian, so we vibed on that. Emma Stone is like the same chaotic, lovely energy, and John Legend just acts too cool for anything. Nice guy.

Good to know.

Yeah.

And you mentioned the loyalty platform. So what loyalty platform did you use? And how did you integrate it in.

Cm, so off the shelf. So back then we were using a platform. I don't know if it actually still exists. It's called Movio. So it's actually a kind of point of sale, kind of integration CRM/ loyalty tool that's purpose built. I think it was built out of Australia, if I'm not mistaken. And so the program we ran was very much a points based program. I think they've adapted it a bit since. But Basically it's every 10 movies, you get one free. So it's like very, very to the point, very simple, but it would take. Basically we had all this information that was really interesting because they put you in a sale and the CRM and loyalty were all integrated really close together so that anytime you bought anything with concession, anytime you saw a movie, we got all that information. So we knew that. Okay, you like, because all of our movies were also tagged you particularly romantic comedies or romance movies, you see them at 11 o' clock on a Sunday. You always get a large popcorn and a large drink. Every Sunday we had people like that.

Yeah.

So it was really interesting to have that level of detail about people.

Yeah. What is your take on loyalty programs for low frequency products? Can you make it work? What are other good ways to engage with the customers in between purchases?

That's a really good question because I've worked with a lot of loyals because basically before coming to Berlin, I mostly exclusively actually worked on loyalty programs as part of CRM. They were always connected. And I think NUMA is the first company where I've actually worked with something that's a very low frequency product like travel. And so we do have a loyalty program. And so I think what we emphasize with our loyalty program is the idea that you're not going to be interacting with us very much because your travel might be really infrequent. We actually have a really low share of repeat travel guests. Again because no one really understands what the fuck NUMA is or who we are. And so a lot of people use us once and never come back. But what we try to emphasize then in those interactions and because we have such a high revenue each time a guest kind of comes through, is we can put a lot into that experience. So anytime you stay at a numa, we've actually just revamped our entire league loyalty program because before it was just if you book on our website, we give you 10% off. We do that because if you book on booking.com and Airbnb where we also advertise, we lose 30%. So we said, okay, 10% off if you come to our website. But now we've really thought that to think, okay, but that doesn't really do anything once you actually get to the unit, like when you actually come and stay. And so what we've added is now you get free snacks and drinks which should last most of your stay. And we refill it if you stay for a long time. We also emphasize things like earlier check in, late checkout and give those things for free as part of it. And so I think when you have a lower frequency product, I think in those small interactions you have just try to create as much value as you can because you might not get that touch point again. Whereas in high frequency. Yeah, just give little bits obviously here and there because it all kind of accumulates. And then what the other part of is that what are other good ways to engage with customers in between purchases? That's a good question. What we try to do at NUMA is, is again just do the content angle, recognizing that we might not see that person again for six weeks, 12 weeks, maybe even a whole year. We just try to not bombard them with messages because we think that probably that's counterintuitive. If it's low frequency, it's low frequency for a reason. But when we do check in, we try to create value through the content we provide.

And I would like to finish up with this last question. CIM as a brand or performance channel. Thoughts?

This is a really, this is a really good one and one we, I always struggle with. I always say CRM is a product. You should always sit in the product team because I've always had a lot of faith in you should have CRM be full stack and have all the resources CRM needs within it. But of the two, I would put brand if I had to. If you put a gun to my head and made me choose in a really weird scenario. And I say that because I think that CRM has a much more important role to play within a company than just saying like generating revenue. And I think we talked about this in our conversation is that in our business especially what typically happens is our operations real estate team says, oh my gosh, we can't believe it. We got this building that's under construction. It's going to be open in two weeks. We bought the whole thing and we need to get people in there now to get a get ROI on the thing because if we don't, then it's going to be just a really black mark on our accounting at the end of the year. And we say, okay, what's the building look like? And they send us photos and I kid you not. It's like some of the rooms don't even have windows yet. And we say will the rooms have windows? When the guests arrive and they're said, they say what windows? Oh shit. And. And so then it becomes this kind of we have to be the ones to be the one to step in and say this is not a good experience for whoever comes in that they come to a room that have no windows. And that's literally the there was no water in some rooms, no heat, no ac. Really bad situation. And still the mentality from the performance angle is we need to recoup this investment. Whereas I think CRM needs to be in a brand position to protect the customer and say that's great, but maybe this is not the right situation to promote for guests. And so that's why more brand because I think CRM needs to have a bigger voice in an organization than just make money. It's more about protect the relationship, which kind of comes at the core of what CRM is.

I think there is no better ending for this. Thank you so much Tim for your time for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

Alright, that brings us to the end of today's episode of Inside CRM. I hope you enjoyed our chat and picked up some useful gems to take back to your own CRM toolbox. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you liked what you heard, do me a favor and subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode. And hey, if you've got a quick sec, check out our website for more great content and updates. Until next time, I'm Jessica Jansen and you've been listening to Inside CRM. Take care.