The goal is to Enhance digital experience (not build a mobile apps)
With every year the distinction between physical and digital connection keeps getting fuzzier. The phrase “I know him” “She is my friend” have a whole different meaning to the consumers of the digital age (what i actually mean is millennials + tech savy Gen X). Being connected on social platforms or exchanging text messages are the new definition of connection for the digital age consumers.
Organizations are striving to connect with customers deeper and longer at every possible opportunity and the organizatoin’s digital channel plays a vital role in achieveing this.
Now when we think of digital engagement we often think of digital marketing on social media platforms, but there is so much more that is out there which can get way higher returns in terms of brand recall, loyalty, increased repeat buying, direct buying and a whole bunch of metrics. Digital expereicnes need to be run across the entire business or better seen as covering the entire customer journey — from first sale to repeat sale.
Speaking specifically about hotels, having a listing on OTA sites, your own booking engine and staying active on trip advisor is not enough. These are just few of the touch points in the journey of the customer.
“Stay & Experience” is where the magic happens and the guest actually decides to come back or not (not withstanding influecing impulse buy decisions with offers & promotional rates). During this stage the digital channels can be used for Marketing and Operations — in hotel speak Back of the House & Front of the House. Hotels can use digital channels to communiate with guests directly without goig through the booker if they have a way to connect during reservation/check-in and stay connected till checkout. One obvious solution are mobile apps, but a small google search around the App fatigue will reveal numbers that may be hard to digest about how expensive it really is to stay on the users smart phone. This is prime real estate, you got to give a lot to get some space there, often not great value for money unless you own a thousand properties under that brand. The idea to overcome this hurdle is to rely on apps that are already on the users smartphone and piggy back on the customer acquisition they do. Facebook Messenger has a 1.3 billion active users, which means pretty much all your travellers will have Facebook Messenger. The conversational interface of such platforms are easy to use and can replicate the hotel app features without having to deal with the challenge to bypass app download fatigue. Add Natural Language Processing and AI to this and you have a chat assistant to help you with everything you need around the hotel. Now that drives connectivity — everyday 250 Billion messages are sent across various platforms, people love chatting and to stay digitally connected hotels must think differently and explore these platforms via chatbots. THINK : MESSENGER AS A CHANNEL.
Switching focus back to being digitally active through the entire journey of the customer — In hospitality service plays a vital role in defining reputation and building loyalty. Gone are the days of points accummulation, this generation is about instant gratification & recognition.
Hotels need to break away from analog communication in operations and focus on converting every interaction into a data point which can be analysed to help improve operations and more importantly predict the customer or ops behaviour. Behaviour analytics can be used to build a predictive engine which can spot happy or unhappy customer before they actually rate the hotel on travel portals, there by allowing a chance to the hotel to resolve issues before its too late ..(read CHECKOUT)
Another use case of operations analytics are ordering & stocking patters in housekeeping — Every service request from a guest inherently sets a service perception in their mind. So these are make or break opportunities to drive this decision. A hotel using our Operations platform say this
Number of towels orders : 500
Number of on time deliveries of towels : 120
Number of escalation/Dis satisfaction incidents for guests : 380
The result, hotel placed more towels in the room and reduced extra towels request to less than 200 for the same period of measurement.
In conclusion, there are several opportunities to go digital beyond the social media pages, OTA listing & Review site presence and a lot of them sit during the time from pre arrival to checkout. This is a crucial phase in the travellers lifecycle where the hotel has an opportunity to buy loyalty and influence the customers to stay again, book direct and lots more.
About The Author: Dheerin Motwani, is the founder of Ease My Stay a hotel communication and operations management platform. To know more about the importance of conversational interfaces and how Ease My Stay can help you visit chat.easemystayapp.com
