How To Transform Your Hotel Guest Experience And Boost Profitability.
by Manoj Sharma, CEO of CusJo
The Immediate Future, For A Change, Is Perfectly Clear.
By 2020, 3 things are going to be absolutes.
- Customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiators as consumers seek out new experiences to enhance their fulfilment levels.
- Customers will manage 85% of their relationships with an enterprise without interacting with a human being as Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Automation (AIRA) become more mainstream.
- And customers will have no patience for anything short of seamless and perfectly synchronised omni-channel solutions.
In addition to the above, organisations are also very clear as to why they need to improve their customer experience. A Genesys study showed the top 3 reasons why businesses proactively manage and invest in customer experience is to:
- Improve customer retention (42%),
- Improve customer satisfaction (33%), and
- Increase cross-selling and up-selling (32%).
Businesses understand, if they improve customer experience, it will positively impact bottom line revenue and if they don’t, it will adverse impact everyone’s pockets too.
But, There Is Still A Chasm Between Guest Expectations And Service Delivery.
Forrester studies show that, 84% of companies aspire to lead in terms of customer experience. These are companies that have defined customer experience as a core thrust and strategy moving forward. But 4 out of 5 of them fail to deliver a satisfactory customer experience; that’s 80% of organisations failing to deliver to the expectations of their guests. This alarming statistic is not an isolated observation.
Bain & Co’s research corroborated that 80% of companies say they deliver ‘superior’ customer service; however, only 8% of those polled thought those same companies deliver ‘superior’ customer service. That’s 92% of people letting companies know, that whatever they think they are doing well when it comes to customer experience, is in reality actually falling astonishingly short.
Kample data suggests 87% of customers think brands need to put more effort into providing a more consistent experience. Do your own straw poll and you will struggle to prove Kample’s data incorrect.
There is a wide perception gap between how establishments feel they are doing and the point of view of customers. This is true for the hospitality industry too. It’s also important to avoid becoming unwitting victims of self-deception, thinking this is only applicable to other organisations and not yours.
So, What Are The Top 3 Things Hotels Need To Do To Stay Relevant?
For hotels to improve their profitability and value proposition they need to localise their experience, reinvent their business model and automate whatever they can using technology. This is an absolute necessity even if means investing a significant amount of time and money, cause the alternative is to get left behind due to irrelevance, perish and die.
The key to doing all of the above is to get savvier with respect to using Artificial Intelligence (AI) enhanced Guest Experience Analytics. Why AI enhanced? Because certain forms of AI, be they to make sense of quantitative or qualitative data have now gotten to the point, where they can do repetitive and menial, yet critical tasks in a way no human being can. And using AI in this way allows humans using AI to optimise and reduce their workload in a way that humans who don’t use AI simply can’t.
The Other Issue Is, How Do You Live Up To The 5 Star Expectations Of Increasingly Technologically Savvy Guests?
The Builders (born before 1945) are virtually gone as a meaningful economic group. Baby boomers (1945–1965) are fading from the scene. Generation X (1965–1980) are struggling to keep abreast and are facing the brunt of job displacement. Generation Y, the Millennials (1980–2000) have changed the game and by 2025, according to the 2014 Deloitte Millennial Survey, will become 75% of the global workforce and thus the biggest economic contributors. Generation Z (2000 onwards) are on the way, will start to become the next biggest contributors and have never known a world without the internet. This is a seismic shift and has deep structural implications on everything from a political, economic, societal, technological and environmental perspective.
How is this impacting the hospitality industry today?
i. Most guests are younger then before and are starting to feel they are being treated like digits. They get no sense that they are being valued as human beings and are fully cognisant that hotels in a tight situation are putting their own interest and considerations above the expectations of their guests. These younger guests are more nuanced and diverse in their cultural orientation. They have vastly different ideas and expectations of what entails a good experience and value for money. This makes it virtually impossible for the hospitality industry, which has been used to a cookie cutter approach, to serve their evolving needs. The uneasy truth is, the hospitality industry just does not know what their guests want, and in the absence of real-time guest experience analytics, they probably never will.
ii. Hotels have a higher absolute number of potential guests today. But, due to their historical and expected growth are facing more entrants into the industry then ever before too. Simultaneously, entry barriers have been lowered, to serve the demands for rooms and new competitors and disruptors are appearing on the scene. Tastes are changing, expensive investment in infrastructure is being demanded of tired looking established chains. This cost has to ultimately be borne by guests. Have you noticed virtually every respectable hotel has gone green? It’s not because they awoke to the interests of the planet, it’s because going green went from being an option, to a mandatory profitability imperative.
Hotels are also struggling for the manpower necessary to provide the historically personalised service they have prided themselves on. But, it’s not just a ratio of staff to guests game. Well trained manpower with the right character, competencies and capacity is at a premium. High-end luxurious establishments may be able to deal with the higher manpower cost structure, but that may not be true down the value chain.
Also, a positive guest experience is still the criteria potential guests use to select a hotel. This far outweighs price, amenities and location.
And what have hotels done when it comes to managing guest experience? In the absence of intelligent guest experience analytics of their own, at each touchpoint, they have left their guests with no choice but to share their experience on social media and websites that don’t belong to them and that they have no control over. In effect, they have been accessary to inviting their guests, who were on their premises to not alert their staff, but to air their dirty laundry publicly instead. This closing act of painting themselves into a corner, is then followed with the encore of setting fire to the house.
Why are hotels incurring unnecessary social media costs as well as deploying internal and external manpower to chase guests around on social media long after they have left their premises, in a desperate attempt at service recovery and getting them to take down their online complaints? Should they be investing at the front end in the right guest experience analytics technologies on their premises instead, that are smart enough to automatically route complains internally and channel compliments externally?
A sub-standard guest experience without immediate recourse is the ultimate killer in the hospitality industry. Once an establishment publicly receives bad reviews, it is extremely difficult to regain its reputation and standing as well as clear it’s name on the internet. The cost-value benefit of having your own real-time Guest Experience Analytics platform on premises is sound. It will allow for instantaneous service recovery on premises and ensures only the good reviews get to other potential guests, thus boosting revenue.
iii. Leadership of hotels well know where the threats are coming from. Right now guests still think of hotels before they think of alternatives to hotels. If hotels do not resolve their localisation, reinvention and automation issues, how soon before guests think of alternatives first? Once that paradigm shifts, it may not be reversible. If you think that may not come to pass, remember that people once thought of taxis before the Ubers of the world. The millennial generation today reaches for their transportation apps and does not even contemplate putting their hand out to flag a cab. The same way a Gen Z today does not understand why taxis even exist. Will they also not understand why hotels exist in the future?
The other imminent threat facing hotels is from the booking websites. They are consolidating amongst themselves, controlling the flow of money and taking an increasingly larger upfront fee. This is leading to a downward price spiral for hotels.
What does Leadership need to do in response to these imminent threats ? The answer lies in getting to know your guest better than anyone else. Leadership needs to give the go ahead to make the call for open innovation visible through your guest experience analytics platform, at all your touchpoints. This way you can invite your guests to partake in the innovation they would like you to make, to more precisely serve their evolving needs and enhance their guest experience.
This is too important a task to be left to external consultants without the hotel’s key staff both driving and being on top of guest experience data as it comes in. Leaving things to external consultants who give you a monthly report, is doing more of the same that has lead hotels into this predicament in the first place. Owning your own guest experience analytics platform and providing all key staff log ins, will allow you to replicate the example of how the Ubers of the world, disrupted the taxi companies. It is wise to appreciate and replicate how innovators innovate.
By paying attention to your guest experience and desires, in the moment, at every touchpoint, and allowing the data sets to build up, will give you a crystal clear and precise picture of how the experience at that touchpoint needs to be innovated from your guests vantage point. It will also enable you to measure which of your staff have been doing great by the customer and who amongst them you need to assist to get even better professionally. You will be amazed at what you will discover and how fast you build a culture of continuing innovation as a result.
Innovation, Cannot Be For The Sake Of Innovation Alone. Realities Need To Be Addressed.
If the hospitality industry wants to stay competitive in the mid term, it needs to do 3 key things.
- Develop innovative solutions to meet genuine guest needs. The way to do this is to discover over time from as large a, your real guest sample, as possible, what their genuine needs are. And then create, invent and implement those solutions in a way that does not make the guest experience clinical, but enhances convenience and communicates warmth too. This is a delicate balance and requires the need to retain humanity while engaging IT.
- Redesign existing jobs, future ready your workforce and strengthen your talent pipeline. The skill level expectation demanded of staff by hotels is going to increase. They are going to have to multi-task and serve multiple stations and will need the mental and emotional dexterity to do this. New skillsets such as an appreciation of new technologies, guest experience analytics, IoT and data science to enhance their value and decision making will be the norm. You will struggle to find these skillsets in the average staff applying for a hospitality job, so it’s best to start building them in your staff instead.
- Prepare for a manpower-light business model. Staff costs over time are going to be exorbitant when compared to maintenance of automations in a Guest Experience / Robotics / Platform / Software as a Service world. So whatever staff a hotel hires and whatever they are designated to do, their competency levels have to be very high. Add to that the fact that their level of personal hospitality, warmth and guest-centricity, will also have to be top notch. This may be the only way for manpower to be viewed to be of value and to maintain warmth in an increasingly transactional world.
So, What’s Next?
Since a logical and natural first step to transforming your hotel guest experience and boosting profitability, is to have a better appreciation of guest experience analytics, please read the following to kick start the appreciation process.
- You need a technology platform that will allows your guests to share their guest experience at every touch point across your hotel; be it the front desk, concierge, all food and beverage outlets, other amenities and of course every individual room. This way you know precisely how each of your guests are experiencing each touchpoint in realtime.
- The first benefit you will derive from this is that every guest will visibly feel that they are partakers in the evolution and guest-centricity of your establishment. This will allow your guests to work in partnership with your staff to keep innovating your value proposition and delivering the best continuing guest experience possible. If you are wondering if it will work, ask some of the most established customer-centric companies in the world.
The Best Guest Experience Companies Do The Following 5 Things.
- They continuously get real-time guest intelligence across every touchpoint and analyse how guests experience them to remove their internal blindspots.
- They ensure guest feedback gets to all key staff in realtime so they can react immediately to both positive and negative guest experiences.
- They ensure all employees from frontliners to managers to executives are intimately involved, responsible and empowered to improve the guest experience at each touchpoint.
- They use the guest experience analytics they gather to innovate at an exponential rate. This way they are able to stay ahead of the rising expectation of guests as well as get a lead on their competitors.
- They pay attention to innovations outside of their industry and bring them into their organisation to wow their customers like no one else.
And this is precisely what we at CusJo, after exploring the best practices globally and factoring in your future needs, help our clients with too.
We’ll Help You:
1.Build & Theme Your Guest Touchpoint Experience Methodology.
There is a science to how we build every Guest Touchpoint Experience methodology. Every guest touchpoint experience methodology should be kept context appropriate, comprehensive yet super short. It should cover all the bases but not take up too much of your guest’s time. It needs the following done in an artful way, supported by a sophisticated and flexible backend technological architecture to facilitate it.
i. A reward module with expiry dates, to incentivise guests to share their experience at as many touchpoints as possible. This will assist you to map your entire guest journey at every stage, be it before, during and after.
ii. A benchmark question. This will allow you to benchmark each touchpoint against the others, as well as get correlational analytics data.
iii. A staff performance module. So you know how each staff at each touchpoint is doing to reward or further develop staff accordingly.
iv. An attachment module. So, in a manpower short world, guests can upload images, videos and other documents using their mobile phones and allow you to see things through their eyes.
v. A demographics module. That way your guests incentivised by our rewards module, can choose to provide their details for follow ups to their guest experience.
vi. A social media module. To help the good experiences go viral, while routing the not-so-good to key members for immediate service recovery.
vii. A sponsor / marketing module. This will help you translate guest experience analytics from a cost centre to a profit centre.
2. Map Every Touchpoint Across Your Hotel Hierarchically, Publish Unique URLs And QR Codes For Each, And Give Your Staff Role Based Logins.
3.Your Staff Get AI-Enhanced Realtime Analytics, At Every Touchpoint And Recover Incidents Before They Go Viral.
Conclusion
You need to transform your value proposition and boost profitability. We’ll help you transform your entire organisation, orientate every activity around your guest experience and boost profitability. Our enterprise grade Guest Experience Analytics platform will give you the opportunity to:
i. Engage every guest, at every touchpoint flexibly. Allow your guests to effortlessly connect at all touchpoints across their guest journey via their preferred channels. This could be through QR code or URLs across websites, mobile apps, chatbots, emails, using their own or your devices to kickstart a conversation and build guest affinity and intimacy.
ii. Benchmark every guest experience. Our AI analytics reports graphically represent all incoming data in real-time to give you complete visibility over your entire guest journey, so you know exactly where you are doing great and where you can afford to do even better.
iii. Innovate your value proposition profitably. Be a smart enterprise by raising the intelligence you make accessible to all key employees. Then watch how much better they know your guests, localise the experience, innovate your value proposition, up-skill themselves and help you boost profitability for everyone.
One Final Parting Thought
No matter what happens to and in the hospitality industry, one key things is always going to remain human; your guest. So, having an excellent AI enhanced Guest Experience Analytics platform matters.
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CusJo is in the business of enhancing human intelligence via AI. They help organisations with their market research, customer journey and employee experience needs and have build one of the world’s most advanced qualitative and quantitative primary research platforms towards that effort.
For more, or to arrange for a conversation to improve your top and bottom line drop them an email at: Hi@CusJo.com
