TylerHollisHill.
Welcome!
My name's Tyler.
Thanks for learning more about me. I'm a strategy and growth leader who has spent most of my career in airlines and software, working for Fortune 500 companies and a tech startup. Consequently, I have a wide range of experience spanning finance, revenue optimization, analytics, loyalty program and benefit design, member strategy, and marketing.
Analytics, Revenue Background: My career began supporting a deal desk and pricing strategy at a leading SaaS company. Afterward, I led revenue optimization at a major airline for 5 years, designing revenue growth and demand management strategy for a portfolio of the airline's highest-grossing international markets (i.e. London, Tel Aviv, Paris, Frankfurt).
Loyalty, Marketing, Growth: I later took that analytical and revenue growth experience into a marketing role where I led loyalty program design for the world's largest elite frequent flyer program for 6 years. Today, I've spent about the last four years with an e-commerce marketplace startup where I serve on the executive team and report directly to the Founder and CEO in a multi-faceted role as Director of Growth, which entails designing lifecycle and LTV growth strategy and leading our first-time user experience.
My Passion for Strategy and Cross-Functional Teams: I'm passionate about creating innovative strategies that drive lifetime value and business growth, and I thrive working cross-functionally with other teams. That's why I have such a passion for loyalty - loyalty is practically its own enterprise in miniature that touches every other part of the business. My experience and interest bend towards senior leadership roles in loyalty, program and product strategy, and chief of staff.
See below for my Experience, Skills, Case Studies, and LinkedIn / Contact Info.
Experience.
15 yrs. Member + Revenue Strategy
15 yrs. SQL + Analytics Exp.
11 yrs. Fortune 500 + Airline Tenure
8 yrs. Loyalty Pgm. Design + Strategy
3.5 yrs. Startup Exp.
1 yr. Executive Team Exp.
1 yr. Partnerships Mgt.
Skills.
Product + Program Strategy
Building + Leading Strategy Teams
Analytics + SQL
Member Experience + LTV Strategy
Campaign Design + Mgt.
Email, Web, Direct Mail
Marketing + Loyalty Operations
PPT, Storytelling with Data
Leading Enterprise Projects
Exec. Presence, High EQ
Revenue Optimization
AB Testing + Live Research
Partnership Management
Case Study. Optimizing Loyalty Value
Problem:
The airline's legacy distance-based elite loyalty frequent flyer qualification resulted in low-value, high-frequency members crowding the highest program tiers (and benefits), while some lower-frequency high-value members couldn't achieve status. This led to a misalignment in value and satisfaction problems with some of the most valuable members.
Solution:
I tackled this problem with an immediate solution to solve satisfaction problems and a long-term design solution to future-proof it from happening again.
Short-Term: I designed an at-risk model using SQL and SAS Enterprise Guide that merged satisfaction event data with historical revenue data and future bookings. I then partnered with operations leaders across the company to implement surprise and delight programs this model could plug into so we could offer high-touch experiences to high-value members that were at risk for churning. Since upgrade benefits were one of the program's most coveted benefits, I created a proactive upgrade program that found members in the model with lowest upgrade success and gave them an upgrade well in advance of their flight with a thank you email for their business. This involved gaining approval from inventory teams and operationalizing the program with customer service agents to execute the upgrades. For our highest value members, I leveraged the Mercedes Tarmac Service which historically was only dedicated to shuttling United's Global Services members between tight connections. I collaborated with airport operations leaders to plug this model into the Mercedes pickup app so that when the cars had downtime, we were offering a white-glove service to these at-risk members. I also partnered with the inflight operations team so that flight attendants proactively recognized these at-risk members' status and value, and offered them complimentary food and alcohol beverages when they were seated in economy. I even flew around the United system to support the roll-out hear how the offering was being received.
Long-term: I came up with a program design proposal that changed the paradigm for how the company (and all US major airlines) qualified members for frequent flyer status. Instead of distance flown, I remodeled the program to be value-based. As this was a major shakeup for the program, I also designed a new upgrade benefit to in parallel enhance member satisfaction and ensure positive reception of the change. This benefit, PlusPoints, was the first-of-its-kind upgrade currency that gave members control of how to use and request their upgrade benefits, solving some of the biggest legacy problems the airline struggled with and leapfrogging competitors in benefits. This also included a complete redesign of the user experience in digital channels where members would interface with the new program and benefits. This project included major change management, project management and requirements building, case studies, modeling, and coordination across a globally matrixed company for a successful rollout. I socialized these business cases with executive and operational leaders, gained approval and funding, and led the largest re-investment in program history to its successful and on-time launch in 2020.
Skilled Used:
Loyalty Program Design
Benefits Design
Executive Presence
Analytics + Modeling (Program, Benefits, Cobrand)
Operations + Execution
Cross-Functional Leadership
Case Study. Removing Operational Blockers
Problem:
When I joined PerkSpot, the startup wasn't able to attribute 47% of its transactions back to members (!) effectively stopping loyalty - the reason I joined - before it even got off the ground. You can't reward members for engagement if you can't track engagement! The reason for this gap was that the company used affiliate marketing integrations for its e-commerce marketplace, so it didn't directly handle the checkout of transactions - its merchant partners did...and these integrations were faulty.
Solution:
Although I didn't know anything about affiliate marketing, I quickly became an expert! To first identify the problem and track it, I created a purchase tracking dashboard that gave the company its first ever insight into the fidelity of its purchase tracking feeds at a merchant level. I networked with affiliate marketing leaders in Chicago to identify the cause of our faulty tracking. We were able to identify a solution and I created a roadmap to fix existing integrations and future-proof new merchant partners. I collaborated cross-functionally with our merchant team to create a new onboarding process that ensured transactions would be traceable back to individual users, and created a working team to fix existing integrations. We tracked these in the aforementioned report to measure progress, and we were able to raise the percentage of transactions trackable back to users from 53% to 94% in just six months. This enabled loyalty expansion, retargeted marketing expansion, and the company's first ever user-level revenue analytics layer, which I designed. I threaded together our revenue databases to create a complete view of user transaction data that our business intelligence teams could iterate reports from and a lifetime value from which to measure marketing strategy. The company migrated measuring performance off of clicks to instead view performance through these revenue-based metric, significantly enhancing how we measure strategy across the enterprise and realigning our OKR's with drivers that directly impacted revenue growth. Afterward, my team added over 100 new loyalty merchants to the portfolio to grow out the program.
