Interview with Piotr Szczygieł, tech lead, about the implementation of DXP Optimizely for Elite Hotels
About Elite Hotels
Elite Hotels is one of the largest and most respected hotel chains in Sweden, with over 40 hotels from Malmö in the south to Kiruna in the north. Elite Hotels combines classic style with modern trends and aims to provide its guests with absolutely the best experiences.
DXP Optimizely and Epinova Framework
Łukasz: Hi Piotr, please tell us about the work on the DXP Optimizely implementation project for Elite Hotels over the past 12 months. I've heard about your initiatives and would like to know what benefits they brought to the client, your team, and yourself.
Piotr: Hi Łukasz. Elite Hotels had an operational website, but there were many challenges. Reservations were made in an external system, which limited the ability to track, optimize, and further develop the entire customer journey. The solution also had a large technical debt, which made it difficult for editors to work and was costly to maintain.
Together with Elite Hotels, we created a completely new website based on Optimizely DXP and the Epinova framework. The solution gives editors great freedom and flexibility in creating and designing pages without support from developers.
Dashboard
When I joined the project, my main task was to implement the shopping cart functionality, which is room reservation. This involved many different threads, and I started checking how the individual steps of room reservation were done. It turned out that there are a series of API requests. Each of these requests contains some information that may seem important in the process of booking a room.
If all this information were combined into one, then you could simply get the whole picture of what the user added to the cart, how they acted, whether they went back, added new rooms, searched for other hotels, or checked other dates?
All this information could be combined into one, into one coherent whole. I proposed introducing a dashboard that would present the entire purchasing path of the user.
The dashboard was implemented based on custom events in application insights. This provides the ability to proactively detect various problems that appear on the client side and fix them. The best way we can achieve this is simply by implementing appropriate event logging. The solution for Elite Hotels was created based on DXP Optimizely and the Epinova framework.
The client was not aware of the possibilities offered by application insights, as they previously had a simpler logging tool at their disposal. The technical team uses the dashboard, but the client also has access to it and can check what is happening in real-time.
Benefits of implementing the dashboard
Ł: From my point of view, a dashboard presenting user behavior, their purchasing process, navigating the hotel offer, these are very important information for the marketing department of Elite Hotels.
P: That's right, it is indeed a wealth of knowledge and it should be emphasized that it is quite reliable knowledge, compared to, for example, Google Analytics. We are not as dependent on cookies as Google Analytics is.
For example, I know that the conversion rate measured in Google Analytics is much lower than in reality - we have much more accurate data on the conversion rate in application insights.
Ł: Tell us how the dashboard helped in the production rollout process.
P: We were rolling out a new solution to production. We all expected that extreme situations might occur that we hadn't tested. Problems did occur. Users discovered them and some of them reported them. Thanks to the dashboard, we were able to capture those problems that users did not report.
In both cases, we were able to trace all the user's steps, at which stage the problem occurred and what the problem was. The precise information allowed us to fix the problems on the spot. I haven't heard of any issues with orders for 4 months. We have reached a stage where those test scenarios that we initially failed to capture and test are now fully covered.
Ł: How is the dashboard used today?
P: We can track events almost in real-time. And it's interesting that, for example, having our site running in an integration environment where there is no user traffic, we only have traffic from our team that is testing, we see these events that have been newly launched in live mode. The dashboard is valuable for developers. It gives a nice feeling that what we have created not only lives somewhere in production and we don't know what's happening with it, but we can actually look inside at any moment and see if there are any problems, if everything is working as intended.
Costs associated with implementing the dashboard
Ł: What is the cost of implementing such a dashboard?
P: Launching application insights along with all the content is a small cost. Of course, developing these events is another matter, it depends on the project and its needs. I believe that when creating a new project, it's worth setting up application insights. It might be useful right away or it might be useful in the future. I know from the implementation for Elite Hotel that it was worth it.
