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PlatformMarriott Bonvoy: Customer-Engagement Ecosystem Overhaul·2023–24
- Global Brand Strategy
- Loyalty & Customer Engagement
- Digital & Social
- Brand Measurement & Governance
From a tool request to an engagement ecosystem.
A brief to “optimize” Marriott Bonvoy’s Sprinklr set-up became Project Astria: eight capabilities rebuilt as one ecosystem, designed with the teams who had to run it.
The situation
Members experience Marriott Bonvoy as one relationship. Behind it sit more than thirty brands and seven thousand properties, each with its own teams, agencies, content and ways of counting.
In 2017–18 I led the Americas task force that ran the enterprise platform RFP and selected Sprinklr; the enterprise-wide launch followed in 2020. In 2023 I returned to the team that supports every Sprinklr user in the company. The brief that arrived in May was reasonable and modest: make sure the loyalty brand’s Sprinklr environment was set up optimally as a new community-management agency came on board.
The diagnosis
“Optimal” is not a setting. I treated the brief as discovery: a summer of interviews across the loyalty, brand, M Live, analytics and continent teams and their agencies, and an audit of how the platform was actually configured. The finding was structural. Eight capabilities built to depend on each other had been configured independently. No foundational tagging taxonomy, so nothing rolled up. Paid metrics defined differently brand to brand. Asset management sitting apart from reporting. Listening with one partner, reporting with another. Nobody was wrong.
The first job was sorting the knowns from the known unknowns: what teams could measure, what they believed they could, and what nobody had defined. Discovery kept returning the same four complaints:
- The platform was too complicated to get what a brand team actually needed out of it.
- Nobody could say, in one place, what consumers were saying about the brand.
- “How do we know our work is making an impact?” had no shared answer.
- Inbound volume was outrunning the team’s ability to reply.
This could not be optimized one capability at a time. It needed redesigning as an ecosystem, starting with the brand carrying the most complexity.
What I built, and with whom
I named it Project Astria, after Astraea — purity and precision, which was the point. I wrote the business case that turned an optimization brief into a four-phase program, took it to senior leadership and secured the resources. Then I led the redesign with the loyalty brand’s community and data leads, the agency community team and Sprinklr’s solutions team, building Bonvoy’s instance to be templatable for every brand:
- One measurement standard across brands. Paid metrics defined once; a rebuilt reporting dashboard with paid, owned and earned in one view; brand share-of-voice and sentiment listening; partnership reporting that spanned two brands.
- An engagement workspace built for judgment. Triage by intent, tone-of-voice standards, profile tags for member tier, and automatic flags for risk and reach — so a community manager could prioritize without reading every message.
- Surprise and Delight as a program, not a gesture. Listening for the moment, a workflow to act on it, a hand-off to care, gift tracking, and a path for the best of it to become content.
- Adoption. A community-management handbook, a phased training roadshow, and a one-page “what the platform can do, by channel” for every brand team.
What it had to hold
Four public moments in one year, each one a test of the same plumbing.
Super Bowl LVII, with Bebe Rexha
A national conversation for a weekend, with the inbound volume to match. Event tagging, reach flags, replies at pace.
Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team
Fans in every time zone, across two Marriott brands, rolling up into one partnership report.
The Threads launch
50K followers in the first week, 160K by year end — added to the same taxonomy on day one.
Surprise & Delight
Seventy-nine fans gifted, and the earned content that followed: 31 pieces, 1.3M earned and organic views.
Figures per the public 16th Shorty Awards entry; the Bonvoy community team and its agency partners ran the program every day.
The complexity
Thirty-plus brands; owned and franchised hotels with different rights to content; a customer-care center with its own workflows; three agencies; the platform vendor; and a loyalty team that had been considering another tool. Most of the work was translation and trust: turning what a community manager needed at eleven at night into a tag, a rule, a column and a dashboard a senior leader would read the next morning, and getting every one of those groups to agree it was theirs.
What changed
One platform, not two.
The loyalty brand chose to build on the enterprise platform rather than buy another tool. Its instance became the pattern offered to the premium, select and luxury brand teams, and by spring 2024 leadership had asked to take the build across the portfolio.
A community program that could run as a system.
The 2023 results proved the appetite. Project Astria gave the program the workspace, Surprise-and-Delight tracking, UGC harvesting, flags and reporting it needed to scale.
Team and program results, 2023 — public figures, not a personal metric
A discipline that outlasted the project,
because it was built into how people worked rather than into a deck.
“She is inquisitive asking the tough strategic questions as well as being able to delve into problems to understand the root cause and develop creative solutions.”
My role
Senior Manager, Global Social Media Platform & Engagement (Apr 2023–Jun 2024): diagnosed the problem, conceived and named the program, wrote the business case, secured leadership sponsorship, led Phases I–II and launch-and-learn, and designed the taxonomy, dashboards, workflows and the hotel-level version. Manager, Digital Marketing — The Americas (2017–18): led the platform evaluation task force and the Americas’ first implementation.
Built with
Marriott Bonvoy’s community-management and data leads, who shaped the workflows and ran them every day; the agency community managers, who lived in the workspace and told me what it needed; Sprinklr’s solutions team, who built to the design; M Live, analytics and the continent teams, who defined what “measured the same way” had to mean; and the customer-care center, who agreed the hand-off rules.